Pointer chain paranoia

[Mike Mason]

I'm looking for opinions from the systemtap community... How paranoid should we be when following pointer chains in tapsets and scripts?  I think we should use deref() unless we're absolutely sure there's no chance of referencing a null or bad pointer, but, of course, that'll add a lot of code. I'm not sure how you can ever be absolutely sure, particularly for longer chains.  What guidance should we give tapset and script writers?

Mike