I know the author <i>claims</i> that there&#x27;s a meaningful similarity beyond the names. But that&#x27;s where I disagree.<p>I get that a NULL pointer is in some meaningful way not a pointer. Because it literally isn&#x27;t pointing to anything. It is not the case that NUL is a char that is not a char. NUL is a perfectly good char. <i>Some</i> functions treat it specially, but other than that it&#x27;s just a regular char.<p>Even the sentinels similarity is quite weak. NULL is a sentinel that indicates &quot;no valid object&quot; whereas NUL is a sentinel that indicates the end of a perfectly valid object. Notice how we&#x27;re not having this discussion about &#x27;\n&#x27; or the whitespace chars in general, even though they&#x27;re also treated as sentinels by some functions.