The current Standard says that any use of an invalid pointer value produces undefined behavior (6.7.6.5.3 [basic.stc.dynamic.deallocation] paragraph 4). This includes not only dereferencing the pointer but even just fetching its value. The reason for this draconian restriction is that some architectures in the past used dedicated address registers for pointer loads and stores and they could fault if, for example, a segment number in a pointer was not currently mapped.

It is not clear whether such restrictions are necessary with architectures currently in use or reasonably foreseen. This should be investigated to see if the restriction can be loosened to apply only to dereferencing the pointer.