Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:47:51 +0000, Jesse Phillips thusly wrote: > The thing is that memory safety is the only safety with code. In > Walter's examples he very clearly showed that a crash is not unsafe, but > operating with incorrect values is. He has pointed out that if > initialization is enforced, whether with a default or by coder, there is > a good chance it will be initialized to the wrong value.
Have you ever used functional languages? When you develop in Haskell or SML, how often you feel there is a good change something will be initialized to the wrong value? Can you show some statistics that show how unsafe this practice is? When the non-nullability is made optional, you *only* use it when you really know the initialization has a sane value, ok? Otherwise you can use the good old nullable references, right? > Now if you really want to throw some sticks into the spokes, you would > say that if the program crashes due to a null pointer, it is still > likely that the programmer will just initialize/set the value to a > "default" that still isn't valid just to get the program to continue to > run. Why should it crash in the first place? I hate crashes. You liek them? I can prove by structural induction that you do not like them when you can avoid crashes with static checking.