File: autoconf.info, Node: Null Pointers, Next: Buffer Overruns, Prev: Preprocessor Arithmetic, Up: Portable C and C++++ 13.4 Properties of Null Pointers ================================ Most modern hosts reliably fail when you attempt to dereference a null pointer. On almost all modern hosts, null pointers use an all-bits-zero internal representation, so you can reliably use ‘memset’ with 0 to set all the pointers in an array to null values. If ‘p’ is a null pointer to an object type, the C expression ‘p + 0’ always evaluates to ‘p’ on modern hosts, even though the standard says that it has undefined behavior.