🚀 go-pugleaf

Ultimately, sometimes you just gotta be realistic about these things.  Yes,
it is a Good Thing to make location 0 nonexistent so that code which touches
it will drop dead.  This will point out a great many bugs, which should be
fixed.  However, that is little comfort if you are on a tight schedule and
the buggy code did somehow deliver the right answer.  The "*NULL == '\0'"
assumption is rather widespread, and it is often harmless, in the sense that
it doesn't usually result in wrong answers.  Making *NULL dump core is
the right thing to do in the long term, but it does have a serious short-
term impact on how soon you can ship the bloody system.  Expediency may
dictate providing some short-term workaround, like an optional ld flag
that makes *NULL work but logs the problem somewhere for later attention.

Note that you will be living with the problem *forever* unless you make
people go out of their way when they want *NULL, so don't make it the default.
-- 
Legalize			Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
freedom!			{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry