On 11/17/2017 6:05 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
There are type systems that do that, which is what is being proposed for C#.
It's pretty straightforward: If I have a variable of class reference type C, it
actually contains a reference to a class instance of type C.
One of the difficulties with this is you'll still need an "empty" instance of C
for the non-null reference to point to. Any attempts to use a method on the
empty instance should throw.
Which is pretty much what a null reference does.
(It's also more or less what floating point NaNs do, where every operation on a
NaN produces a NaN as a result.)
