Ed Loehr <pgpatches@bluepolka.net> writes:
> They get occasional unexpected results? Your point is well-taken
> regarding masking programming errors, but guarding against a null
> ptr crash is not 'masking the error'
I agree with Bruce on this one. I think the right analogy is not
one of "let's be friendly if he passes a null pointer" but "should
we try to detect a bogus input pointer". If we are passed a random
bit-pattern for the 'from' pointer, we will almost certainly core
dump on trying to dereference it. We have no reasonable or portable
way to defend against that. I tend to think that being passed a null
pointer is a member of this class of events, not something that we
should have a special-case defense against. It is a caller bug and
the caller should fix it, just the same as if the caller passed us
a bogus non-null pointer.
regards, tom lane