On 1/17/14 1:31 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 1/17/2014 12:35 PM, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad"
<ola.fosheim.grostad+dl...@gmail.com>" wrote:
On Friday, 17 January 2014 at 19:43:58 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I've almost never had a problem tracking down the cause of a null
pointer.
Usually just a few minutes with a debugger and getting a backtrace.
Doesn't work if the unexpected "null" sits in a graph and the source
of it is
hard to pinpoint or occurs "randomly". E.g. if you are using a "black
box"
framework or it happens spuriously on a server because it is triggered
by a
database timeout which never happens on the dev server.
As I replied elsewhere, tracking down the source of a bad value in any
variable is a standard debugging problem. There isn't anything special
about null in this regard.
One problem with null is it's not "proportional response", i.e. it takes
the application in the back and shoots it in the head instead of e.g. a
stale display. That _does_ make null special; there's a large category
of application for which aborting is simply not an option.
Andrei
