Referencing through a null pointer

[Jim Shankland]

In article <9946 at tekecs.TEK.COM> andrew at frip.gwd.tek.com (Andrew Klossner) writes:
>We can sit here and smirk about how ideologically impure these fools
>are who want a 0 at location 0, but the real world is full of hoary old
>programs that run fine on a VAX and fail on the class of systems that
>don't have a 0 at 0.  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?

Personally, all my code assumes there's a 17 at location 0.  It comes
in really handy sometimes, and it works great on my machine, a
Waxahatchy 9400/X; if my program breaks on other machines that stupidly
put some other value at 0, or that read-protect address 0, then those
other machines are just broken.

Aren't they?

Jim Shankland
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