On Saturday, September 15, 2012 19:35:44 Alex Rønne Petersen wrote: > Out of curiosity: Why? How often does your code actually accept null as > a valid state of a class reference?
I have no idea. I know that it's a non-negligible amount of the time, though it's certainly true that they normally have values. But null is how you indicate that a reference has no value. The same goes for arrays and pointers. Sometimes it's useful to have null and sometimes it's useful to know that a value can't be null. I confess though that I find it very surprising how much some people push for non-nullable references, since I've never really found null to be a problem. Sure, once in a while, you get a null pointer/reference and something blows up, but that's very rare in my experience, so I can't help but think that people who hit issues with null pointers on a regular basis are doing something wrong. - Jonathan M Davis
