Null references (oh no, not again!)

[Brad Roberts]

On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> I did some more research and found a study:
> 
> http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~chalin/papers/TR-2006-003.v3s-pub.pdf
> 
> Very interestingly (and exactly the kind of info I was looking for), the study
> measures how references are meant to be in a real application of medium-large
> size.
> 
> Turns out in 2/3 of cases, references are really meant to be non-null... not
> really a landslide but a comfortable majority.
> 
> 
> Andrei

I'd love to see a similar study for smart pointers.  Are they more like 
pointers or references?  My assumption is references, leading to them 
beign poorly named. :)

Later,
Brad