References in D

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 15-09-2012 19:13, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> 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
>

Out of curiosity: Why? How often does your code actually accept null as 
a valid state of a class reference?

I find that more often than not, code is written with the assumption 
that null doesn't exist. As a great fan of functional languages, I'm 
always sad when a language picks unconstrained null over nullable types 
or an Option<T> type.

-- 
Alex Rønne Petersen
alex at lycus.org
http://lycus.org