References in D

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, September 15, 2012 15:24:27 Henning Pohl wrote:
> On Saturday, 15 September 2012 at 12:49:23 UTC, Russel Winder
> 
> wrote:
> > On Sat, 2012-09-15 at 14:44 +0200, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
> > […]
> > 
> >> Anyway, it's too late to change it now.
> > 
> > I disagree. There are always opportunities to make changes to
> > things,
> > you just have manage things carefully.
> 
> I don't know if people really use the ability of references being
> null. If so, large amounts of code will be broken.

Of course people use it. Having nullable types is _highly_ useful. It would 
suck if references were non-nullable. That would be _horrible_ IMHO. Having a 
means to have non-nullable references for cases where that makes sense isn't 
necessarily a bad thing, but null is a very useful construct, and I'd _hate_ 
to see normal class references be non-nullable.

- Jonathan M Davis