Null references redux

[bearophile]

Jari-Matti M.:

> It depends on the boolean representation. I see no reason why a built-in 
> feature should be slower than some bitwise logic operation in user code. 
> After all, the set of operations the language provides for the user is a 
> subset of all possible operations the language implementation can do.

I agree. One of the best qualities of C++ is that it often allows the programmers to build abstractions with no or minimal cost. A good systems language is a language that allows you to define a built-in looking syntactic construct (for example a function) that for example allows you to access and use parts of a floating point number with the same efficiency of C/asm code.

Bye,
bearophile