On Saturday, 18 January 2014 at 01:05:50 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Because I've tracked down the cause of many, many null pointers, and I've tracked down the cause of many, many other kinds of invalid values in a variable. Null pointers tend to get detected much sooner, hence closer to where they were set.
To be fair, I do think we should require explicit initialization for char for instance instead of putting in them an invalid codepoint. Still, the consequences for null are much more dramatic, which make it more worthwhile to change. They don't have the same ROI as they don't have the same cost.
