Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:11:54 -0800, Walter Bright wrote: > Nick Sabalausky wrote: >> I was assuming he meant cost of implementing that feature, but maybe >> you're right...? > > I meant the cost to the user.
The fact is that some of the references in a correct program are non- nullable. If the program behaves according to the spec, those references will never point to null. What a language designer should do is to analyze the use cases and make the more common case the default. Type inference could aid the user here. I'm not sure how much trouble wrong guesses would cause, though.