[rkbjones]

Not for readability. Checking for NULL becomes second nature after programming on a real world C project for a while. I cannot recall the last time I forgot it.

On the contrary, I wish C had INT64_INVALID etc., which would facilitate some APIs considerably. Of course that's a dream that would require something like 72-bit words, where one byte is reserved for flags. This would also be a dream for GC flags...

Also, since Hoare et al. the tooling has gotten much better. Valgrind catches really almost everything.