[rvense]

But it is never what you want. So even if there are no immediate explosions, your LED's not going to blink the way you expected it. I'd say a clear, stern sign that something was wrong is better than limping along after dereferencing null.

[throwaway84742]

Sure. I’m just saying that null pointer deref and read is not generally a fatal operation. Most programmers expect the program to die in this case. When it doesn’t, they are surprised.