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

Also, do you have another example (beside the Wikipedia one) where nullptr is superior to good old 0?

Yes. It's also a (simplified) real-world example that occurred in our production code. It only stood out because gcc was able to issue a warning when crosscompiling to a platform with different register width (still not sure exactly why only when crosscompiling from x86_64 to x86, warns warning: converting to non-pointer type 'int' from NULL):

Consider this code (C++03):

#include 

struct B {};

struct A
{
    operator B*() {return 0;}
    operator bool() {return true;}
};

int main()
{
    A a;
    B* pb = 0;
    typedef void* null_ptr_t;
    null_ptr_t null = 0;

    std::cout << "(a == pb): " << (a == pb) << std::endl;
    std::cout << "(a == 0): " << (a == 0) << std::endl; // no warning
    std::cout << "(a == NULL): " << (a == NULL) << std::endl; // warns sometimes
    std::cout << "(a == null): " << (a == null) << std::endl;
}

It yields this output:

(a == pb): 1
(a == 0): 0
(a == NULL): 0
(a == null): 1