What part of dereferencing NULL pointers causes undesired behavior?

Question

I am curious as to what part of the dereferencing a NULL ptr causes undesired behavior. Example:

//  #1
someObj * a;
a = NULL;
(*a).somefunc();   // crash, dere         


        

Answer 1

It would still cause a crash because you're still instructing the compiler to attempt to access the memory at location 0 (which is forbidden). Depending on the signature of anotherfunc, you may be passing a reference (which are forbidden from being initialized with a NULL object), or a copy of *b.