But, when talking about this I didn't want to muddy the waters with my own assert alternatives. Programmers have a hard enough time focusing on the issue of a for-loop vs. a while loop.
Edit: malloc returning NULL means you're out of heap. That's usually catastrophic in almost all cases, but the important part is that people don't detect that, then use the NULL pointer. That's the bug.
http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ex20.html
But, when talking about this I didn't want to muddy the waters with my own assert alternatives. Programmers have a hard enough time focusing on the issue of a for-loop vs. a while loop.
Edit: malloc returning NULL means you're out of heap. That's usually catastrophic in almost all cases, but the important part is that people don't detect that, then use the NULL pointer. That's the bug.