On 1/9/2013 11:40 AM, Rob T wrote:
Yes you are correct. I was thinking of nullable references when I made that comment. When you dereference on a nulled reference, I suppose that's not really referencing deallocated memory. I'm not sure what exactly happens behind the scenes when you dereference a null pointer, but obviously bad things happen and it's not safe, also it is a memory related problem.
Null pointer faults are not a memory safety issue. Memory safety is not defined as "no bugs", it is defined as "no bugs that corrupt memory".
I did qualify what I said by mentioning that it depends on the definition of memory safety. According to my definition of memory safety, a memory leak is still a memory leak no matter how it happens.
If we each define our own meanings for words, we cannot understand each other. Memory safety is a standard piece of jargon, with a standard definition.
