Spec#, nullables and more

bearophile bearophileHUGS at lycos.com
Fri Nov 5 15:53:20 PDT 2010


Denis Koroskin:

> I'm tired of pointing out that NO ONE is talking about eliminating null  
> pointers, but rather extending an existing type system to support  
> non-nulls. Your hate towards non-nullables comes from misunderstanding of  
> the concept.

The nullables/nonnullables topic is not basic stuff, but it's not a too much complex thing. In my bug report I have explained about adding both the ? and @ suffix to reference/pointer types (? is for the nullables), so Walter knows and understands what you are saying.

A temporary experimental fork of DMD, with nullable types + null path analysis as explained in this thread (I have an idea to improve the way Spec# manages arrays of nonnull references, with a kind of loop variant that in many cases avoids testing all items again) may be created to try these ideas experimentally in D (despite I think it's not a feature for D2, it's for D3). This may show how much bad or good that extension is. But it's a lot of work.

Bye,
bearophile


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