Having "%s" print "(null)" is perfectly fine for debugging and actually makes your life a lot easier since seeing "(null)" in your output is much quicker than p

Having "%s" print "(null)" is perfectly fine for debugging and actually makes your life a lot easier since seeing "(null)" in your output is much quicker than popping into the debugger trying to figure out what line caused a segfault. (Yes, you can do it with a ternery but writing rigorous debug code is never on anyone's list). Having "%s" print "(null)" is absolutely useless in the meat of your string manipulation code. It's pretty much guaranteed to be a bug and could easily mask a problem (as described in the article). So I think the real problem here is that printf() is used for both debugging and for non-debugging string manipulation (sprintf() and friends). It's trying to serve two masters and it can never get both cases right. Maybe we should make "%s" not check for null and add a null-able "%S" for debugging.