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Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA5804 ; Fri, 01 Jan 93 01:56:25 EST Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!uunet!usc!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!yale.edu!yale!mintaka.lcs.mit.edu!ai-lab!hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu!mycroft From: mycroft@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: [386bsd] GNU malloc in favor of BSD malloc in libc - shall we vote? Date: 1 Jan 1993 03:10:48 GMT Organization: /etc/organization Lines: 21 Message-ID: <1i0cnoINNiu2@life.ai.mit.edu> References: <JKH.92Dec31154004@whisker.lotus.ie> <1hvu79INNjqq@ftp.UU.NET> <1993Jan1.001332.15123@serval.net.wsu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu In article <1993Jan1.001332.15123@serval.net.wsu.edu> hlu@eecs.wsu.edu (H.J. Lu) writes: > > Another `feature' in GNU malloc is malloc (0) returns NULL. According to ANSI, malloc(0) is implementation-defined. I believe some systems intentionally return a bogus(?) address so that sloppy programs don't have to think about it. Obviously, you can't write or read at the address returned by malloc(0) anyway; what difference can it really make? The only place I've seen a problem with returning NULL is functions like xmalloc() which check the address from malloc() to see whether or not it succeeded, and these are trivial to modify so that they do not depend on implementation-specific behavior. -- \ / Charles Hannum, mycroft@ai.mit.edu /\ \ PGP public key available on request. MIME, AMS, NextMail accepted. Scheme White heterosexual atheist male (WHAM) pride!