Null references redux

[Lutger]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> "Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message
...
> You're acting as if handling failures safely and minimizing failures were
> mutually exclusive.

Not that I have an opinion on this either way, but if I understand Walter 
right that is exactly his point (although you exaggerate it a bit), see 
below.
 
>> It's not designed to segfault. It's designed to expose errors, not hide
>> them.
> 
> Right. And some of these errors can be exposed at compile time...and you
> want to just leave them as runtime segfaults instead? And you want this
> because exposing an error at compile time somehow causes it to become a
> hidden error?

somehow -> encourages a practice where programmers get annoyed by the 
'exposing of errors' to the point that they hide them

This is what it's about, I think: are non-nullable references *by default* 
so annoying as to cause programmers to initialize them with wrong values (or 
circumventing them in other ways)? 
The answer may depend on the details of the feature, quality of 
implementation and on the habits of the 'programmers' in question, I don't 
know.