Nick Sabalausky wrote:
I agree with you that if the compiler can detect null dereferences at
compile time, it should.
Also, by "safe" I presume you mean "memory safe" which means free of
memory corruption. Null pointer exceptions are memory safe. A null pointer
could be caused by memory corruption, but it cannot *cause* memory
corruption.
No, he's using the real meaning of "safe", not the misleadingly-limited
"SafeD" version of "safe" (which I'm still convinced is going to get some
poor soul into serious trouble from mistakingly thinking their SafeD program
is much safer than it really is). Out here in reality, "safe" also means a
lack of ability to crash, or at least some level of protection against it.
Memory safety is something that can be guaranteed (presuming the
compiler is correctly implemented). There is no way to guarantee that a
non-trivial program cannot crash. It's the old halting problem.
You seem to be under the impression that nothing can be made uncrashable
without introducing the possibility of corrupted state. That's hogwash.
I read that statement several times and I still don't understand what it
means.
BTW, hardware null pointer checking is a safety feature, just like array
bounds checking is.
