Referencing through a null pointer

[Bill.Stewart.<ho95c>]

In article <9946 at tekecs.TEK.COM> andrew at frip.gwd.tek.com (Andrew Klossner) writes:
> If I'm a computer center manager searching for a replacement
> for my aging 11/780's, and my several-megabyte Bread-and-Butter
> Application works on system X but not on system Y, how much
> credence do you think the Y salesperson will get from me when she
> explains that my program has no business dereferencing 0?

	Sigh.  It's evil, and managers just don't *understand* :-).
We have a manager here who still doesn't trust HPs becuase the
floating point formats are different, and doesn't trust 3Bs because
they're big-endian.

You can't just fix it by putting a zero into location zero, either,
since people can dereference structure pointers without setting
them first.  (i.e. struct foo { int a,b,c; } foo; x=foo->c; )
You might tell them that VAX programs that suffer from this problem
will sometimes produce WRONG OUTPUT SILENTLY on VAXen.
-- 
#				Thanks;
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs
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