Question

From time to time, I run into communications issue with other programmers, when we talk about NULL. Now NULL could be

a NULL pointer
the NUL character
an empty data element in some sort of database.

NUL seems to be the most confusing. It is the ASCII character 0x00.
I tend to use ‘\0’ in my code to represent it. Some developers in my group
tend to prefer to simply use 0, and let the compiler implicitly cast it to a char.

What do you prefer to use for NUL? and why?

Answer 1

I use '\0' for the nul-character and NULL for pointers because it is clearest in both cases.

BTW, both 0 and '\0' are ints in C and either one will be converted to char when stored in a char variable.