Walter Bright wrote:
Rainer Deyke wrote:
Writing an assertion for every non-nullable reference argument for every
function is tedious.
It's also quite unnecessary. The hardware will do it for you, and the
debugger will tell you where it is.
The hardware won't help you with array overflows or uninitialized
variables, however.
The hardware will catch it when you try to use a null pointer. It does
nothing for you when you store null in a pointer that's supposed to be
valid.
In order for you to make sure you don't store null somewhere you can't
have null, you need to add an invariant to that effect, make that field
private, and always access it via public properties.
And you can't compile with -release.
This is only a problem with complex data structures, usually, I think.
I'd like to try non-nullable by default, but there are a number of
issues that would have to be resolved that seriously affect their
usability. Also, I don't like the opportunity cost of asking Walter to
implement this feature.
