Not crashing when calling something on a NULL object is not necessarily a bad thing. You should read: Enhancing Server Availability and Security Through Failure-Oblivious Computing You can also use TRUE/FALSE and 1/0 for boolean values, too. Dropping stack allocation for objects is, IMHO, a good thing. The fact that C++ has to truncate an object when you pass a subclass to a method that expects the superclass via the stack, but does not when you pass a pointer to it. Not what most people would expect and would break dynamic dispatch.

So how are you going to create these off-site valid totals? Because it sounds like you're suggesting that we should connect these machines to some sort of network, which I think would be a bad idea.