Null Pointers Prior to C++11

In earlier versions of C++, the value specified for a null pointer was 0 or NULL. NULL is defined in several standard library headers to represent the value 0. Initializing a pointer to NULL is equivalent to initializing a pointer to 0, but prior to C++11, 0 was used by convention. The value 0 is the only integer value that can be assigned directly to a pointer variable without first casting the integer to a pointer type.