Can non-nullable references be implemented as a library?

[spir]

On Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:12:02 -0600
Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> On 11/7/10 1:54 PM, retard wrote:
> > Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:39:09 +0200, so wrote:
> >
> >>> Andrei's stance is, either a library addon or ship D without that
> >>> feature. D's library already contains both tuples and algebraic data
> >>> types. They're simple to use, almost like in Python. The reason for
> >>> library addons isn't that builtin features make less sense, the reason
> >>> is that TDPL is already out and we can't improve the language in any
> >>> radical way.
> >>
> >> Lets talk about solution in this thread more than politics, politics
> >> "never" improve anything.
> >
> > There was this other thread here -- "why a part of d community do not
> > want to go to d2?"
> >
> > One reason is, there's no good process for handling these feature
> > proposals. Walter attends useless bikeshed discussions and spreads
> > misinformation about things he doesn't get, Andrei has excellent
> > knowledge of languages but he often prefers staying in the background.
> >
> > There are these DIPs in wiki4d. Were they useful? At least it seems that
> > this thread is leading nowhere. Half of the people don't know what non-
> > nullable means.
> 
> In all honesty, the distribution of those who don't understand non-null 
> is about equal across the proponents and the opponents :o).

Perhaps a great help would be to approach it so-to-say backwards: option types à la Haskell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_type
(The fact that our pointers are nullable by default makes it difficult to imagine the opposited pov, I guess.)

Denis



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