On Monday, 20 November 2017 at 10:07:08 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
The problem with null as seen in C++/Java/D is that it's a
magical value that different types may have. It breaks the type
system.
Not sure if it breaks the type system, but it would be cleaner to
construct types with null "int|null", "float|null" etc, but then
you would have a high level language and there are many NaN
values (two semantic Nan values, but many encodings that might be
used for conveying extra information)
assuming a value was not null. But it wouldn't have been
better with non-nullable types, since the logic error would
have been hidden and may have been much, much harder to
recognize and track down.
No, it would have been a compile-time error instead.
Yes, but you don't need non-nullable types, you could have
subtyping of nullable types instead. For floats that would be
very useful. E.g. constraint a float to the range [0.0, 1.0> or
integers or not-infinity/not-nan etc.
