On Friday, October 05, 2012 08:45:31 Alex Burton wrote: > One is the language designer allowing null to be an acceptable > value for a pointer to an int. > As should be blatently obvious that null is not a pointer to an > int, but for historical reasons inherited from C (when people > were just happy to get out of assembly language) it has been > allowed.
You are going to find plenty of people who disagree quite strongly with you. There are times when having a type be non-nullable is very useful, but there are times when having a type be nullable is extremely useful. You seem to think that the idea of nullability is bad in the first place, and while some people will agree with you, a _lot_ will not. You're fighting a losing battle if you're arguing that. It would be a _huge_ design mistake for a systems language not to have nullable pointers. Having non-nullable references or pointers in addition to nullable ones might be useful, but not having nullable ones at all would be crippling - especially for a systems language. I think that we're clearly going to have to agree to disagree here. - Jonathan M Davis