Daniel Keep wrote:
Just noticed this hit Slashdot, and thought I might repost the abstract
here.
http://qconlondon.com/london-2009/presentation/Null+References:+The+Billion+Dollar+Mistake
I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null
reference in 1965. [...] This has led to innumerable errors,
vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a
billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years. [...] More
recent programming languages like Spec# have introduced declarations
for non-null references. This is the solution, which I rejected in
1965.
-- Sir Charles Hoare, Inventor of QuickSort, Turing Award Winner
I suggested to Walter an idea he quite took to: offering the ability of
disabling the default constructor. This is because at root any null
pointer was a pointer created with its default constructor. The feature
has some interesting subtleties to it but is nothing out of the ordinary
and the code must be written anyway for typechecking invariant
constructors.
That, together with the up-and-coming alias this feature, will allow the
creation of the "perfect" NonNull!(T) type constructor (along with many
other cool things). I empathize with those who think non-null should be
the default, but probably that won't fly with Walter.
Andrei
