null references redux + Looney Tunes

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Justin Johansson" <no at spam.com> wrote in message 
news:haavf1$2gs7$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> It's a difficult challenge to get high performance, readable and 
> maintainable code out of complex number
> intensive algorithms.   Use of library types for complex numbers has, in 
> my experience been problematic.
> Complex numbers should be first class value types I say.
>

There's been discussion before (I can't find it now, or remember the name 
for it) of type systems that allow for proper handling of things like m/s 
vs. m/(s*s) vs inch/min etc. I haven't actually worked with such a feature 
or with complex/imaginary numbers in any actual code, so I can't be sure, 
but I've been wondering if a type system like that would be an appropriate 
(or even ideal) way to handle real/complex/imaginary numbers. (I've also 
been wondering if it might be a huge benefit for distinguishing between 
strings that represent a filename vs file content vs file-extention-only vs 
relative-path+filename, vs absolute-path-only, etc. I've been really wanting 
a better way to handle that than just a variable naming convention.)