NULL v. zero

Posted Jul 17, 2004 4:32 UTC (Sat) by Ross (guest, #4065)
In reply to: NULL v. zero by ikm
Parent article: NULL v. zero

But what do you mean by target type? LHS? If so, this goes against
fundamental aspects of the language. The evaluation of the RHS should
not be affected by the type of the LHS. The conversion should only
happen just before the assignment. And if such conversion happens, that
is an implicit conversion -- an implicit cast. That's not strong type
checking. And my point is that the RHS may be more than a simple
unadorned zero. When that is the case it would be nice to know ahead of
time if the type is an integer or a pointer so that it could warn about
improper manipulation of pointers (multiplying pointers for example).
Maybe that's a contrived corner case but I still see it as an ugly aspect
of the language.