[phobos] phobos commit, revision 1552

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

I am tired of explaining you the fallacies of your argument.

When you feel like "I am willing to believe I might be completely 
missing an essential point", please let me know.


Andrei

On 05/26/2010 08:39 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>
>
> Denis wrote:
>> On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 11:09 PM, Walter Bright<walter at digitalmars.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> Gee, I spent a whole 2 minutes looking at the problem.
>>>
>>
>> "Cure me doctor, I'm ill."
>> "Why bother? It's easier to take 2 pills every day to suppress the symptoms."
>>
>> A problem which is easy to solve is still a problem.
>>
>>
>
> It's true that if the language got rid of null pointers, there wouldn't
> be null pointer exceptions. The problem is this doesn't solve the
> problem, it just shifts it elsewhere. I normally use null pointers for
> data that shouldn't be there, like for example, to mark the end of a
> list. If I didn't have null pointers, I'd have to write a special "end
> of list" object. What should that object do if accessed? Throw an exception.
>
> And so I'm right in exactly the same place I was with the null pointer,
> except that I had to write a bunch of extra code to get there.
>
> Null pointer exceptions are not bugs. They are bug /detectors/. Defining
> null pointers out of a language is like putting black electrical tape
> over the oil pressure light on your car. Voila! No more pesky lights
> annoying you!
>
>
>
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