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A null pointer has a value reserved for indicating that the pointer does not refer to a valid object. Null pointers are routinely used to represent conditions such as the end of a list of unknown length or the failure to perform some action; this use of null pointers can be compared to nullable types and to the Nothing value in an option type.
In object-oriented computer programming, a null object is an object with no referenced value or with defined neutral (null) behavior.The null object design pattern, which describes the uses of such objects and their behavior (or lack thereof), was first published as "Void Value" [1] and later in the Pattern Languages of Program Design book series as "Null Object".
In C, two null pointers of any type are guaranteed to compare equal. [3] The preprocessor macro NULL is defined as an implementation-defined null pointer constant in <stdlib.h>, [4] which in C99 can be portably expressed as ((void *)0), the integer value 0 converted to the type void* (see pointer to void type). [5]
NULL: Macro expanding to the null pointer constant; that is, a constant representing a pointer value which is guaranteed not to be a valid address of an object in memory. wchar_t: Type used for a code unit in "wide" strings.
For example, if the expected type is int *, then a null pointer should be passed as (int *)NULL. Writing just NULL would result in an argument of type either int or void *, neither of which is correct. Another consideration is the default argument promotions applied to the unnamed arguments.
In most encodings, this is translated to a single code unit with a zero value. For instance, in UTF-8 it is a single zero byte. However, in Modified UTF-8 the null character is encoded as two bytes: 0xC0,0x80. This allows the byte with the value of zero, which is now not used for any character, to be used as a string terminator.
In computer programming, a null-terminated string is a character string stored as an array containing the characters and terminated with a null character (a character with an internal value of zero, called "NUL" in this article, not same as the glyph zero).
The std::string type is the main string datatype in standard C++ since 1998, but it was not always part of C++. From C, C++ inherited the convention of using null-terminated strings that are handled by a pointer to their first element, and a library of functions that manipulate such strings.