[Ukfreebsd] Notes from last nights meeting

[David Chisnall]

On 12 Feb 2016, at 12:37, Sevan Janiyan <venture37 at geeklan.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Understanding and Using C Pointers
> http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028000.do

This sounded interesting, so I read the free sample big.  If the rest of the book is in the same vein, then I would strongly recommend that people avoid this book.  The amount of undefined / implementation-define behaviour that the early examples rely on is staggering, and some of the advice is actively bad (e.g. it’s fine to use 0 instead of NULL - this is true in most contexts, but it relies on implicit conversion and you have to be very careful to add explicit conversion in cases where implicit conversion will not happen, such as when calling a variadic function: passing 0 on a 64-bit system as a null terminator to a variadic function will likely cause stack corruption).

Some of what he says is just perplexing, such as 'A pointer to void will never be equal to another pointer.’

David