Article View: comp.std.c
Article #5799Re: realloc
From: John Hascall
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 1989 20:21
Date: Fri, 31 Mar 1989 20:21
17 lines
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1276 bytes
In article <9122@alice.UUCP> andrew@alice.UUCP (Andrew Hume) writes:
>gregg townsend reminds us of the pANS ``feature'' that malloc(0) returns NULL.
>can anyone provide the (or any) justification of this pointless stupid
>definition? i just love the idea that an initialised pointer is SOMETIMES
>indistinguishable from an uninitialised pointer.
And what would you have it return? An Address? ...which points to
zero bytes of allocated storage? And would successive malloc(0)
calls return the same pointer? (you're not using any heap with each
call) And then consider doing a "free" on such a pointer.
Just think of malloc(NULL) as not initialising the pointer,
just as malloc(MORE_BYTES_THAN_WE_GOT) doesn't.
John Hascall
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!atanasoff!hascall From: hascall@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (John Hascall) Newsgroups: comp.std.c,comp.lang.c Subject: Re: realloc Message-ID: <934@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> Date: 31 Mar 89 20:21:27 GMT References: <10170@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <10032@ihlpb.ATT.COM> <9974@megaron.arizona.edu> <9122@alice.UUCP> Reply-To: hascall@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (John Hascall) Organization: Iowa State Univ. Computation Center Lines: 17