References in D

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, October 05, 2012 08:45:31 Alex Burton wrote:
> One is the language designer allowing null to be an acceptable
> value for a pointer to an int.
> As should be blatently obvious that null is not a pointer to an
> int, but for historical reasons inherited from C (when people
> were just happy to get out of assembly language) it has been
> allowed.

You are going to find plenty of people who disagree quite strongly with you. 
There are times when having a type be non-nullable is very useful, but there 
are times when having a type be nullable is extremely useful. You seem to 
think that the idea of nullability is bad in the first place, and while some 
people will agree with you, a _lot_ will not. You're fighting a losing battle 
if you're arguing that.

It would be a _huge_ design mistake for a systems language not to have 
nullable pointers. Having non-nullable references or pointers in addition to 
nullable ones might be useful, but not having nullable ones at all would be 
crippling - especially for a systems language.

I think that we're clearly going to have to agree to disagree here.

- Jonathan M Davis