References in D

[Maxim Fomin]

On Wednesday, 3 October 2012 at 10:41:34 UTC, Henning Pohl wrote:
> On Wednesday, 3 October 2012 at 08:11:32 UTC, Franciszek 
> Czekała wrote:
>> Agreed. Nullable types are a feature not a bug. There is no 
>> need to change it. Bugs occur when you do not know the 
>> language rules and make assumptions instead. This can happen 
>> whith any language and any rules. As to an example use of 
>> nullable references: consider a board game (for example 
>> chess). The boards has cells which can be empty or occupied. 
>> Model this with an array of class objects  representing 
>> pieces. null reference means a cell is not occupied. If you 
>> want to remove a piece from the board assign null to it and GC 
>> will take care of the rest. Now, doing this with full objects 
>> representing empty cells would require needless work to define 
>> such "null" objects and would be wasteful of memory (typically 
>> boards are sparsely populated). Now imagine a really big board 
>> and every cell holding references to useless objects 
>> simulating null references. It would not make sense. Saying 
>> that null references are evil is just propaganda. Let's keep D 
>> a sane language.
>
> There is a related question at stackoverflow: 
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/693325/non-nullable-reference-types
>
> As you can see the "nullable references are great" guy has been 
> voted down.
>
> I've written like 5k lines of code in D and never felt the need 
> of using null. C++'s std::shared_ptr has the same issue, but at 
> least it is called pointer.

Since when stackoverflow comment reputation is a word in a 
programming languages? Especially, in issue which is subject for 
human desire to escape from awareness and then complaining about 
arised problems.