On Saturday, 15 September 2012 at 17:12:23 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
Of course people use it. Having nullable types is _highly_
useful. It would
suck if references were non-nullable. That would be _horrible_
IMHO. Having a
means to have non-nullable references for cases where that
makes sense isn't
necessarily a bad thing, but null is a very useful construct,
and I'd _hate_
to see normal class references be non-nullable.
- Jonathan M Davis
And many usages of null as a state leads to really bad design.
There are functions which behaviour is completly different if you
pass null instead of a valid pointer/reference. An example would
be:
http://www.khronos.org/registry/cl/sdk/1.1/docs/man/xhtml/clGetDeviceIDs.html
