On Wednesday, 3 October 2012 at 10:41:34 UTC, Henning Pohl wrote:
On Wednesday, 3 October 2012 at 08:11:32 UTC, Franciszek
Czekała wrote:
Agreed. Nullable types are a feature not a bug. There is no
need to change it. Bugs occur when you do not know the
language rules and make assumptions instead. This can happen
whith any language and any rules. As to an example use of
nullable references: consider a board game (for example
chess). The boards has cells which can be empty or occupied.
Model this with an array of class objects representing
pieces. null reference means a cell is not occupied. If you
want to remove a piece from the board assign null to it and GC
will take care of the rest. Now, doing this with full objects
representing empty cells would require needless work to define
such "null" objects and would be wasteful of memory (typically
boards are sparsely populated). Now imagine a really big board
and every cell holding references to useless objects
simulating null references. It would not make sense. Saying
that null references are evil is just propaganda. Let's keep D
a sane language.
There is a related question at stackoverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/693325/non-nullable-reference-types
As you can see the "nullable references are great" guy has been
voted down.
I've written like 5k lines of code in D and never felt the need
of using null. C++'s std::shared_ptr has the same issue, but at
least it is called pointer.
Since when stackoverflow comment reputation is a word in a
programming languages? Especially, in issue which is subject for
human desire to escape from awareness and then complaining about
arised problems.
