Is there any difference between null and 0 when assigning to pointers in unsafe code?
- by Eloff
This may seem odd, but in C (size_t)(void*)0 == 0 is not guaranteed by the language spec. Compilers are allowed to use any value they want for null (although they almost always use 0.)
In C#, you can assign null or (T*)0 to a pointer in unsafe code.
Is there any difference?
(long)(void*)0 == 0 (guaranteed or
not? put another way:
IntPtr.Zero.ToInt64() == 0)
MSDN has this to say about IntPtr.Zero:
"The value of this field is not equivalent to null." Well if you want to be compatible with C code, that makes a lot of sense - it'd be worthless for interop if it didn't convert to a C null pointer. But I want to know if IntPtr.Zero.ToInt64() == 0 which may be possible, even if internally IntPtr.Zero is some other value (the CLR may or may not convert null to 0 in the cast operation)
Not a duplicate of this question
