On Thu, 25 Nov 2010 10:54:39 -0600
Ellery Newcomer <[email protected]> wrote:
> From a language designer's perspective, I think programmer association
> of semantic meaning to null (along with null's weak typing) is a more
> serious problem than npe vulnerabilities.
True! An unfortunately rarely pointed issue and somewhat nebulous to expose.
I had the idea of an UNDEF value on the implementation side that could not be
used/assigned explicitely by the programmer. It would just allow idioms like
if (x) {} // if x is not undefined...
by beeing under the hood logically equal to false, but any operation, even
toString (I mean writeTo ;-) would raise an UndefinedSymbol exception. Since
it's not assignable, a programmer cannot load it with app semantics (eg: author
name unknown, element not found, invalid color code... whatever). A trial to
get the best of both worlds. Just remains the problem of false/UNDEF not beeing
distinct in logical expressions.
Denis
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