Re^2: How to kill perl?

[robin]

in reply to Re: How to kill perl?
in thread How to kill perl?

Why doesn't unpack "P", 0 dump? I expected it to and this confused me.

The reason (on some level) is that pp_unpack() calls newSVpvn(), which calls sv_setpvn(), which has this code:

    if (!ptr) {
        (void)SvOK_off(sv);
        return;
    }

In other words, unpack("P", 0) just returns an undefined SV. Since C code often uses null pointers in the same way that Perl code uses undef, I think this is more useful than crashing. :-)