Misunderstanding, silly error, or compiler bug?

[Peter C. Chapin]

Peter C. Chapin wrote:

> Interesting. Okay, so I'm trying to compare the Node referenced by
> currrent to null. I didn't define an opEqual for class Node so does that
> mean the compiler gives me a default one? I guess I would have expected
> some sort of type mismatch error ('null' isn't a Node, after all).

I think I answered my own question on this. I now understand that == and
!= do value comparisons. Thus even though the right parameter is a
reference, the operator is intended to access the object pointed at by
that reference to render its decision. Thus something like

	current == null

is doomed to failure even if 'current' refers to a real object because
opEqual is going to want to dereference null.

Peter