Spec#, nullables and more

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:

> The $10 billion mistake was C's conversion of arrays to pointers when passing to 
> a function.
> 
> http://www.drdobbs.com/blog/archives/2009/12/cs_biggest_mist.html
> 
> Sadly, there's an ongoing failure to recognize this, as it is never addressed in 
> any of the revisions to the C or C++ standards,

I agree, that's a very bad problem, probably worse than null-related bugs. But Java, C#, and D have solved this problem already, so we can now go on and try to solve other problems. This thread was about a different problem (null-related bugs), currently present in Java, C#, and D too.


> and is missed by the supposedly "safe C" alternatives.

This is probably wrong. I don't know many C alternatives, but the well known Cyclone language uses fat pointers (and other things) to solve that C problem.

Bye,
bearophile