Turning a macro defined in probably hundreds of header files into a keyword would be a very bad idea for backward compatibility. It would have been nice if C ha

Turning a macro defined in probably hundreds of header files into a keyword would be a very bad idea for backward compatibility. It would have been nice if C had reserved it for use as a pointer and C++ had been coded from the beginning to allow NULL to be defined to any pointer type, but that wasn't how it ended up. But what library vendors can do now is to simply #ifdef __cplusplus #if /* version check for C++11 */ #undef NULL #define NULL nullptr #endif #endif And that way there's less stuff to memorize, but still requires that the code itself has to opt-in, instead of the language having to figure out what insanity NULL may have been defined to.