On Sat, Nov 12, 2005 at 04:01:07PM -0500, Andrew Pinski wrote:
> Was there an example of:
>
> int f(int &);
>
> int g(void)
> {
> int *a = 0;
> return f(*a);
> }
>
>
> Yes this would be undefined code but so what.
In a case like this, gcc could emit an error (since we can already
detect that a reference is always initialized to a null pointer).
If it did so, I can almost guarantee that some free software package
will be flagged (I recall writing such code myself 10+ years ago, before I
knew better), but it still might be a good thing.
Of course, it's not hard to hide the fact that a reference is null from
the compiler, and the compiler might then do optimizations based on the
assumption that the argument to f is a non-null reference. That would
be valid according to the standard.
