In support of this. Dereferencing a NULL pointer is undefined behaviour.

http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...

C Standard http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf 6.5.3.2 Address and indirection operators ... If an invalid value has been assigned to the pointer, the behavior of the unary * operator is undefined. ... Among the invalid values for dereferencing a pointer by the unary * operator are a null pointer