Changed definition of the possibile return value "NULL"

[TheAngusMcFire]

Hi, I teach (student assistant) Systems Level Programming on the Technical Univerity of Graz.
I noticed students get confused by the difference 0 and NULL. To make sure NULL is not confused with an actual type value, which can be returned by malloc/calloc... I would change the "returns NULL" to "a value equal to NULL".

[mkerrisk]

Hello, Please submit patches as per https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/patches.html That said, the language you propose is rather nonstandard [1], so I'm a little dubious about this proposal. But, perhaps if you post a patch as above, some others might chime in with useful opinions. Thanks, Michael [1] The C standard very consistently uses "null pointer", but SUS/POSIX seem to pretty freely use "NULL" in the same sense as often appears in manual pages.

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On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 at 13:55, TheAngusMcFire ***@***.***> wrote: Hi, I teach (student assistant) Systems Level Programming on the Technical Univerity of Graz. I noticed students get confused by the difference 0 and NULL. To make sure NULL is not confused with an actual type value, which can be returned by malloc/calloc... I would change the "returns NULL" to "a value equal to NULL". ------------------------------ You can view, comment on, or merge this pull request online at: #18 Commit Summary - Changed definition of the possibile return value "NULL" File Changes - *M* man3/malloc.3 <https://github.com/mkerrisk/man-pages/pull/18/files#diff-fe900c219dc9d00a61f86bba257c58d0> (26) Patch Links: - https://github.com/mkerrisk/man-pages/pull/18.patch - https://github.com/mkerrisk/man-pages/pull/18.diff — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#18>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAIBT2HNEZXL4ZA5INFMWN3ROAUENANCNFSM4MO76MAA> .

-- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/