Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote: > Daniel Keep wrote: > > Just noticed this hit Slashdot, and thought I might repost the abstract > > here. > > > > http://qconlondon.com/london-2009/presentation/Null+References:+The+Billion+Dollar+Mistake > > > >> I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null > >> reference in 1965. [...] This has led to innumerable errors, > >> vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a > >> billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years. [...] More > >> recent programming languages like Spec# have introduced declarations > >> for non-null references. This is the solution, which I rejected in > >> 1965. > > > > -- Sir Charles Hoare, Inventor of QuickSort, Turing Award Winner > > I suggested to Walter an idea he quite took to: offering the ability of > disabling the default constructor. This is because at root any null > pointer was a pointer created with its default constructor. The feature > has some interesting subtleties to it but is nothing out of the ordinary > and the code must be written anyway for typechecking invariant > constructors. > > That, together with the up-and-coming alias this feature, will allow the > creation of the "perfect" NonNull!(T) type constructor (along with many > other cool things). I empathize with those who think non-null should be > the default, but probably that won't fly with Walter. > > > Andrei
Alias this?
