On 05/19/2013 02:32 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Sunday, May 19, 2013 02:22:43 Simen Kjaeraas wrote:Or... possibly, the current holes in @disable are fixed, and NonNull!T becomes the default, because we tell people to always use them, rather than flail our arms and behave like idiots. ("regular pointers are broken, use NonNull!T" is a pretty good argument if it's true)I've never understood why so many people feel that nullable pointers are a problem. Clearly, many people do, but personally, I've rarely had problems with them, and there are plenty of cases where not being to make a pointer null would really suck (which is why we're forced to have std.typecons.Nullable for non-reference types). I'm not arguing against having non-nullable pointers, but I'd probably almost never use them myself, as I really don't think that they'd be buying me much. In my experince, problems with null pointers are extremely rare and easily caught. - Jonathan M Davis
I don't write a lot of buggy code for myself either. You are arguing for leaving out cheap code documentation. Also, in a sane system you'd be forced to use types without a null value in many cases, as potentially null references ought not be dereferenced. i.e. potentially null would mean they _really_ can be null, because otherwise an actual reference to a value type could be used.
