On Wednesday, 3 October 2012 at 16:36:15 UTC, Henning Pohl wrote:
Just put something like a questionmark behind the reference type to indicate that it's nullable.
...
Not really. It's all about one question mark for example.
How much code would be broken by moving nullable references from current state to "question mark notation"?
I expect that non-nullable class objects (called references here) addition (if there is no objections to idea in general) would not break much code and would not request vast syntax changes. And it likely can be done by still defaulting to nullable references. For example, it can be done with the help of @nonnullable (like immutable) type qualifier and semantic check of operations involving references with such qualifier. Anyway, my estimation of probability of accepting constructions like "type&", "type*?", etc and defaulting to non-null references is very low, at least for D2.
