Disallow null references in safe code?

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Sunday, 2 February 2014 at 15:06:34 UTC, Idan Arye wrote:
> I think it's safe to assume that you - being a supporter of the 
> non-null movement - write your own code in a way that tries to 
> avoid the usage of null as much as possible.

You'd be wrong - I was against the not null thing for a long 
time, including while writing dom.d.

> If I have a class\struct `Foo` with a member field `bar` of 
> type `Bar`, and an instance of `Foo` named `foo` that happens 
> to have no `Bar`, I'll not add an extra boolean field just to 
> indicate that `foo` has no `Bar` - I'll simply set `foo.bar` to 
> null!

Me too, that's exactly what I did with Element parentNode for 
instance.

> And I'll use the fact that UFCS works perfectly fine when the 
> first argument is null to build functions that accept `Bar` as 
> first argument and do the null checking internally(if it's 
> needed!) and safely call them on `foo.bar`.

Again. me too.


Some of my code would break with not null by default, but the 
amazing thing is it really isn't the majority of it, and since 
the compiler error would point just where it is, adding the 
Nullable! to the type is fairly easy.