Surprising properties of C null pointer constants

A previous blog post mentioned two properties of NULL that many developers find surprising:

• NULL does not need to be 0 when stored in memory — the compiler is allowed to transform the value when casting between integer and pointer types, so

  union {
      uintptr_t u;
      void *p;
  } u;
  u.p = NULL;
  printf("0x%" PRIxPTR "\n", u.u);
  

  does not need to print 0, even though u.p==(void*)0 evaluates to true.
• NULL does not need to be a pointer — it is valid for an implementation to define NULL as

  #define NULL 0
  

  so it is not portable to pass NULL to a va_arg function, as this will fail for architectures where sizeof(int)!=sizeof(void*).

Today I found a third case in the paper "Beyond the PDP-11: Architectural support for a memory-safe C abstract machine" — casting an integer variable having the value 0 to a pointer type is not guaranteed to produce a null pointer. For example, it is implementation-defined if the comparison

int zero = 0;
bool b = (void*)0 == (void*)zero;

evaluates to true or false. Both (void*)0 and (void*)zero cast the value 0 to void*, so I had naively thought that both would produce a null pointer, but the standard does only guarantee this for (void*)0 as it is a constant expression

An integer constant expression with the value 0, or such an expression cast to type void *, is called a null pointer constant. If a null pointer constant is converted to a pointer type, the resulting pointer, called a null pointer, is guaranteed to compare unequal to a pointer to any object or function.

while the result is implementation-defined when casting a variable

An integer may be converted to any pointer type. Except as previously specified, the result is implementation-defined, might not be correctly aligned, might not point to an entity of the referenced type, and might be a trap representation.

So (void*)0 is a null pointer while (void*)zero is converted in an implementation-defined manner,  which may or may not produce a null pointer...