Re: question about nullptr

Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> writes:

Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> writes:
>

Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> writes:
>

Hmm.  I like the idea of a type-agnostic way to express a "zero"
value, [but] C's use of 0 for all scalar types strikes me more as
an historical accident than a design feature.

>
I don't think it was an accident at all.  It was chosen to be
consistent with how if(), while(), !, ?:, and so forth, all act.
There is a very consistent design philosophy there.  Sometimes
people who come from a strong Pascal background don't like it,
but personally I find the C model easier and more convenient to
work with than the Pascal model.

>
In early C, int was in a very real sense the default type.  In B,
types weren't even explicit, and IIRC variables were effectively "of
type int", or more precisely a 16-bit PDP-11 word.  (I'm glossing
over some details of B, many of which I don't know).  In that
context 0 made sense as a general-purpose "zero" value.

My comment is not about the type but about the value.  That
the constant 0 happens to be of type int is irrelevant to
my conclusions.