I was wondering if NULL
is guaranteed to be 0
in C++, so I searched and came across these:
This answer states that:
I think its fine practice to assume so. Having said that, it would be horrible practice to #undef NULL and or redefine it as something else. So long story short, it's not a 100% guarentee because it is possible to be something else, but it NEVER should be.
Is NULL guaranteed to be 0?
According to the standard, NULL
is a null pointer constant (i.e. literal). Exactly which one, is implementation defined.
Prior to C++11, null pointer constants were integral constants whose integral value is equal to 0, so 0
or 0l
etc.
Since C++11, there is a new null pointer literal nullptr
and NULL
may be defined as being nullptr
. (And thus literal interpretation of Bjarne's quote has become obsolete).
Prior to standardisation: NULL
may be defined as (void*)0
in C. Since C++ was based on C, it is likely that some C++ dialects pre-dating the standard might have used that definition, but such definition is not conformant with standard C++.
And for completeness: As explained in more detail in SO post linked in a comment below, null pointer constant being 0 does not necessarily mean that the value of the null pointer address is 0 (although the address being 0 is quite typical).
What can be concluded about this:
NULL
to represent the number zero (use 0
with appropriate type suffix if appropriate), nor to represent a null-terminator character (use '\0'
).NULL
resolves to a pointer overload.NULL
but instead use nullptr
if your standard is >= C++11. In older standard you can use (T*)NULL
or (T*)0
if you need it for overload resolution... that said there are probably very few cases where overloading integers with pointers makes any sense.