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C's a Real Nowhere, Man

If you've ever watched Wile E. Coyote spinning his legs in thin air above some canyon floor, you've seen what happens when you try to use a C pointer that doesn't point to anything. C's macro name for this ticket to nowhere is NULL. It isn't hard to accidentally create null pointers; in fact, you get one every time you define a static pointer variable. Look at the following code:

 int val = 25;
 int *ptr;

 *ptr = val;

This code will be compiled but will either blow up or corrupt memory at runtime. Although ptr is defined as a pointer, it's value is initially NULL (or some undefined value). Thus, the assignment statement's target doesn't have a valid address. The two correct alternatives are:

 ptr = &val;

which assigns the address of val to ptr, or

 ptr  =
 (int *) malloc( sizeof( val ) );
 *ptr = val;

which (usually, as I explain in the next section) allocates memory to store the value 25. If you're counting on one of my "magic macros" to avoid this pitfall, you may be disappointed that I can offer only the shopworn C programming dictum: Be careful! Unless you're positive a pointer has been initialized, check it for NULL, as shown below, before using it:

 if ( ptr NE NULL ) {
    *ptr = val;
 }
 else {
    printf( "ptr is NULL\n");
 }

Some compilers let you generate checks for referencing uninitialized variables or NULL pointers, and you may want to use this defense both during development and for production applications.

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