Keyword to avoid not null references

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Sunday, 22 April 2012 at 16:59:05 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> As such checkNotNull shoud be more than throwing an exception. 
> I have tried this, but it should get some constraints. Also 
> wouldn't the new lambda syntax look nice with null here: null 
> => unsafe(a)?

Yeah, I like this idea, though a lot of what I do
is more like

if(x !is null) use(x);

hmmmm, the default could be to simply do nothing on
the other side. I think we can work with the lambda idea.

The other null related things on my mind are:

1) if we could make new return NotNull!T. I guess
we could offer an alternative:

NotNull!T create(T, Args...)(Args) {
     return assumeNotNull(new T(Args));
}

Though "new" is so well entrenched that I don't think
it is going anywhere, and having a language construct
depend on a library structure is pretty meh.

So meh.

2) When doing chained calls, have it simply ignore the
rest when it hits null.

suppose:
if(a) if(auto b = a.something) b.more();

I guess some languages would call that
a?.something?.more();

but I wonder if we can do it in a library somehow.


ifNotNull(a).something.more();


Suppose it returns a wrapper of a that has an opDispatch
or something that includes the if check, and wraps
the rest of the return values.


I'm pretty sure we can do that!