I’m delighted to receive reader email regarding the various puzzles in the C programming language. Some of them involve creative thinking and approaches that seem like they work — but don’t. Pointers are one of the most common subjects.
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The C11 standard added the “underscore” bunch to the C language’s traditional keywords:

_Alignas
_Alingof
_Atomic
_Bool
_Complex
_Generic
_Imaginary
_Noreturn
_Static_assert
_Thread_local

I don’t routinely use any of these in my programs, beyond trying a few out to see how they work. The _Bool keyword comes in handy. The rest? Well, they’re worth exploring from a curiosity standpoint. For this week’s Lesson, I reveal the mysteries of the _Generic keyword.
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My approach for initializing a buffer is to use a loop and assign each byte a value such as zero or the null character, '\0'. It’s tedious, but necessary. And for the impatient, some functions are available to perform this task for you.
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When my code requires a random odd buffer, I generally assign it a given size in some holy computer value: 16, 32, 64, and so on. But a defined constant exists, BUFSIZ, that can also be used to set a buffer size safely and consistently on all C compilers.
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The defined constant NULL represents a null or empty pointer. I’ve written before that the constant isn’t defined as zero, though such an assumption could lead you into trouble.
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Mathematicians truly enjoy doing their math thing. As a mortal human, I don’t have a spot for math things on my “fun” spectrum. Yet, one of the more jolly things the math nerds do is discuss the value zero.
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