I think you do have a point about possibly misleading people in relation to signed overflow, since that is common hardware behaviour, but for the point about null pointer de-reference, I believe thinking in terms of assembly would actually help people realize that referencing memory location 0 (if that is what null was defined to), will not immediately crash your program.  It is not special, it&#x27;s just another memory location.<p>Your point about teaching assembly as being a waste of time also has some merit.  Of course people still do program in assembly, but it is only becoming more and more rare to actually need someone to program assembly, which is why it just isn&#x27;t emphasized as much any more and it makes C seem like an even stranger language for someone who started on Python or Javascript.