Spec#, nullables and more

[Leandro Lucarella]

Walter Bright, el  6 de noviembre a las 01:47 me escribiste:
> Rainer Deyke wrote:
> >On 11/5/2010 17:41, Walter Bright wrote:
> >>In other words, I create an array that I mean to fill in later, because
> >>I don't have meaningful data for it in advance.
> >
> >That's a faulty idiom.  A data structure that exists but contains no
> >valid data is a bug waiting to happen - no, it /is/ a bug, even if it
> >does not yet manifest as incorrect observable behavior.  (Or at best,
> >it's an unsafe optimization technique that should be wrapped up in an
> >encapsulating function.)
> 
> An example would be the bucket array for a hash table. It starts out
> initially empty, and values get added to it. I have a hard time
> agreeing that such a ubiquitous and useful data structure is a bad
> idiom.

In that example, null is *valid* data. Invalid data is when it has no
meaning to your algorithm and in you example null has a very important
meaning.

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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