I am tired of explaining you the fallacies of your argument.
When you feel like "I am willing to believe I might be completely
missing an essential point", please let me know.
Andrei
On 05/26/2010 08:39 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
Denis wrote:
On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 11:09 PM, Walter Bright<[email protected]> wrote:
Gee, I spent a whole 2 minutes looking at the problem.
"Cure me doctor, I'm ill."
"Why bother? It's easier to take 2 pills every day to suppress the symptoms."
A problem which is easy to solve is still a problem.
It's true that if the language got rid of null pointers, there wouldn't
be null pointer exceptions. The problem is this doesn't solve the
problem, it just shifts it elsewhere. I normally use null pointers for
data that shouldn't be there, like for example, to mark the end of a
list. If I didn't have null pointers, I'd have to write a special "end
of list" object. What should that object do if accessed? Throw an exception.
And so I'm right in exactly the same place I was with the null pointer,
except that I had to write a bunch of extra code to get there.
Null pointer exceptions are not bugs. They are bug /detectors/. Defining
null pointers out of a language is like putting black electrical tape
over the oil pressure light on your car. Voila! No more pesky lights
annoying you!
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