What exactly is nullptr?

Question

We now have C++11 with many new features. An interesting and confusing one (at least for me) is the new nullptr.

Well, no need anymore for the nasty mac

Answer 1

Well, other languages have reserved words that are instances of types. Python, for instance:

>>> None = 5
  File "", line 1
SyntaxError: assignment to None
>>> type(None)

This is actually a fairly close comparison because None is typically used for something that hasn't been intialized, but at the same time comparisons such as None == 0 are false.

On the other hand, in plain C, NULL == 0 would return true IIRC because NULL is just a macro returning 0, which is always an invalid address (AFAIK).