null [re: spec#]

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 11/7/10 9:08 AM, Denis Koroskin wrote:
> On Sun, 07 Nov 2010 18:01:32 +0300, steveh <steveh57 at hotmai.l> wrote:
>
>> Sounds more retarded than the notorious 'retard' here. It's because of
>> people like u that D3 might not come. If you disagree too much with AA
>> and WB they have no interest to make D3. This nonnull question might
>> be good place to give up.
>
> Cool down and relax! His post wasn't actually that bad.

Clearly it is the preference of some that non-null references are the 
default (so then one can use e.g. an option datatype to model nullable 
references). It is also the preference of some that values are immutable 
by default. I think it's too late to change such defaults at this point.

I think it's reasonable to let the current references and pointers 
continue to be as they are, and work on @disable (particularly its 
interaction with constructors) to make it easy to implement restricted 
subsets of values. Then NonNull would be a useful library artifact among 
other ones.


Andrei