Opportunities for D

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 18:18:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> You are totally missing the point if you consider this even 
>> comparable
>> replacement. Reason why non-nullable types are awesome because 
>> you are 100% sure
>> compiler will force you to handle null cases and if program 
>> compiles it is
>> guaranteed to be safe in that regard. What you propose makes 
>> hardly any difference.
>
> I'll risk annoying everyone by repeating at this point "what do 
> you propose". Making non-null pointers the default is going to 
> break every D program and so is not acceptable.

Unfortunately I can only propose to do nothing and abandon this 
idea for any foreseeable future. It is one of sinkholes which 
consume lot of discussion time but all good solutions are 
unacceptable and all acceptable solutions are not practical.

One possible compromise is to define a DScanner rule to assume 
all normal pointers/references non-nullable by convention and 
enforce it for Phobos . Don't know how realistic it can be 
though, most likely not at all.