On 1/17/14 5:05 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 1/17/2014 4:17 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Even if you got rid of all the nulls and instead use the null object
pattern, you're not going to find it any easier to track it down, and
you're in even worse shape because now it can fail and you may not even
detect the failure, or may discover the error much, much further from
the source of the bug.
How do you know all that?
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.
I'm not sure at all. Don't forget you have worked on a category of
programs for the last 15 years. Reactive/callback-based code can be
quite different, as a poster noted. I'll check with the folks to confirm
that.
The larger point I'm trying to make is your position and mine requires
we need to un-bias ourselves as much as we can.
Andrei
