On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 12:23 -0700, Dan Weston wrote: > Tim Docker wrote: > > > > David Roundy wrote: > > > >> Which illustrates the point that it's not type safety > >> that protects us from segfaults, so much as bounds checking, > >> and that's got a non-trivial runtime cost. At least, most > >> segfaults that *I've* caused (in C or C++) have been from > >> overwriting the bounds of arrays, and that's precisely the problem > >> that Haskell does *not* solve using its type system. > > > > That differs from my experience. Most segfaults that *I've* caused (in > > C or C++) have been due to dereferencing null pointers. Type safety > > does help you here, in that Maybe lets you distinguish the types of > > things that are optionally present from those that must be. > > > > Tim > > Huh? Type safety buys you not having to worry about dereferencing stale > nonnull pointers (lifetime of reference exceeding lifetime of referent), > but nothing about dereferencing null pointers, which are the moral > equivalent of Nothing.
Actually, that's garbage collection. > Failure to handle a null pointer is just like using fromJust and results > in the same program termination (undefined). jcc _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
