Null references (oh no, not again!)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Burton Radons" <burton.radons at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:gopodl$dne$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Walter Bright Wrote:
>
>> Jason House wrote:
>> > IMHO, this type of thing is easy to understand.
>>
>> Yeah, well, I still get regular emails (for the last 20 years at least)
>> from the gamut of professional programmers at all levels of expertise
>> who do not understand what "undefined symbol" from the linker means. It
>> happens so often I am forced to consider the idea that the defect lies
>> with me <g>.
>>
>> If I could figure a way to design *that* out of a linker, I would.
>
> For every extern generate a weak symbol that does nothing but assert out 
> with an error message; if it's properly resolved it goes away, if not then 
> it's executed when the symbol is called. Now the linker isn't giving any 
> errors.
>
> I actually remember doing that once! What the hell was I doing that for? 
> Some kind of late binding malarkey maybe.

That's sort of cheating, the error's still there, it's just gets shoved from 
build-time to run-time.