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throwaway9233

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throwaway9233
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
Still waiting for JNullType to be deleted or made illegal to inhabit all reference types.

"I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years. In recent years, a number of program analysers like PREfix and PREfast in Microsoft have been used to check references, and give warnings if there is a risk they may be non-null. More recent programming languages like Spec# have introduced declarations for non-null references. This is the solution, which I rejected in 1965." -- Tony Hoare

Let's give credit to C# and Dart for fixing this, and bring shame to Java and Go for not doing so.
throwaway9233
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
- Anything from suckless

- Lua

- Redis

- idtech3

- libuv

- linux kernel

- sqlite

As much as Ruby, Python, and Go tout for being elegant or clean to read, they are pretty horrible to read in the wild. C is where it's at.
throwaway9233
·4 jaar geleden·discuss