Can non-nullable references be implemented as a library?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 11/7/10 11:34 PM, spir wrote:
> On Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:12:02 -0600
> Andrei Alexandrescu<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org>  wrote:
>
>> On 11/7/10 1:54 PM, retard wrote:
>>> Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:39:09 +0200, so wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Andrei's stance is, either a library addon or ship D without that
>>>>> feature. D's library already contains both tuples and algebraic data
>>>>> types. They're simple to use, almost like in Python. The reason for
>>>>> library addons isn't that builtin features make less sense, the reason
>>>>> is that TDPL is already out and we can't improve the language in any
>>>>> radical way.
>>>>
>>>> Lets talk about solution in this thread more than politics, politics
>>>> "never" improve anything.
>>>
>>> There was this other thread here -- "why a part of d community do not
>>> want to go to d2?"
>>>
>>> One reason is, there's no good process for handling these feature
>>> proposals. Walter attends useless bikeshed discussions and spreads
>>> misinformation about things he doesn't get, Andrei has excellent
>>> knowledge of languages but he often prefers staying in the background.
>>>
>>> There are these DIPs in wiki4d. Were they useful? At least it seems that
>>> this thread is leading nowhere. Half of the people don't know what non-
>>> nullable means.
>>
>> In all honesty, the distribution of those who don't understand non-null
>> is about equal across the proponents and the opponents :o).
>
> Perhaps a great help would be to approach it so-to-say backwards: option types à la Haskell
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_type

That would be Algebraic.

> (The fact that our pointers are nullable by default makes it difficult to imagine the opposited pov, I guess.)

Agreed.


Andrei