Author didn't say "treat null pointer as an empty string". To treat a C string as empty, I have to dereference the pointer and see that the first byte is \0. I

Author didn't say "treat null pointer as an empty string". To treat a C string as empty, I have to dereference the pointer and see that the first byte is \0. If the pointer is 0x0 then I crash. But if I want to copy 0 bytes to or from 0x0, I do not have to dereference 0x0. I would want to spend way too long with the standard before I opined on the correctness of the author's statement, but "zero-sized object" is definitely different from "zero-length string".