DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

> My opinion is that the reason that language is in there, and has to be there, is so that malloc(), or anything else that works with a pointer, can return or check for an error. And the reason dereferencing a NULL pointer is undefined is because there is no telling how a platform behaves when you do so. See how none of this has anything to do with the compiler ?

You have muddled the NULL pointer (an abstract idea) with the all zeroes address on a typical CPU, these are intentionally not the same thing.

While it's obviously a bad idea, C has no trouble with using actual values from a type as sentinels, atoi("junk") and atoi("0") are both zero. So it wouldn't have been a problem to define that malloc() returning zero can be either an error or an actual zero address. And because C runs on the abstract machine, not some actual platform with whatever weird behaviour, the question of what happens if we try to do platform illegal operations never comes up.

Most platforms are likely to either not be phased at all by the all-zeroes address, or to be equally concerned with some other address values, including values beyond some logical "end of memory", ROMs, and memory mapped peripherals. We can observe that the C language does not define special behaviour for any of these, only NULL which means something in the abstract machine and *that* is why it's used as a sentinel value.