That's in general not desirable. The conditions that lead to the dereference of the null pointer can be arbitrarily complicated, including coming from templated

That's in general not desirable. The conditions that lead to the dereference of the null pointer can be arbitrarily complicated, including coming from templated code or macro expansions. For all you know, the condition in that if statement could very well be the same condition to govern whether the pointer is null or not.