On Saturday, 4 January 2014 at 23:04:12 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
The list is endless. Why is null special?
Because it is an instant crash, because it is not possible to
make it safe without runtime check, because it is known to fool
optimizer and cause really nasty bugs (typically, a pointer is
dereferenced, so the optimizer assume it isn't null and remove
null check after the dereference, and then the dereference is
removed as it is dead. a bugguy code that could have crashed
will know behave in random ways).
An instant crash is a very nice way to fail, compared to, for
example, what failure means for an SQL injection or a buffer
overrun. A crash is bad, but it's better than a program
continuing to execute erroneously.
I have to agree with Walter here. Non-null is certainly nice, but
it's just one kind of error out of a million, and not a
particularly serious one at that.
