I've actually seen code equivalent to this used for control flow. It was a very old bit of safety-critical code(!) that initialized a bunch of hardware from pre

I've actually seen code equivalent to this used for control flow. It was a very old bit of safety-critical code(!) that initialized a bunch of hardware from predefined tables containing pointers to overrides. For table values that weren't overridden (very few by the time I came along), it would access the null pointer to intentionally trap so an interrupt could insert the correct default and restart the instruction. Certain higher ups determined that behavior was a business requirement when I refused to reimplement it on a new platform.