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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Can a pointer (address) ever be negative?

Programmer Question

I have a function that I would like to be able to return special values for failure and uninitialized (it returns a pointer on success).



Currently it returns NULL for failure, and -1 for uninitialized, and this seems to work...but I could be cheating the system. iirc, addresses are always positive, are they not? (although since the compiler is allowing me to set an address to -1, this seems strange).



[update]
Another idea I had (in the event that -1 was risky) is to malloc a char @ the global scope, and use that address as a sentinel.



Find the answer here

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