this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Programming
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With what in mind? Evading
NULL
?Languages that make use of references rather than pointers don't have this Dualism. C# has nullable references and nullability analysis, and
null
as a keyword.What does your reasoning mean in that context?
It's not about references vs pointers. You could easily have a language that allowed "null references" (edit: too much C++; of course many languages allow null references, e.g. Javascript) or one that properly separated null pointers out in the type system.
I agree with your point though, using a special
Null
value is usually worse than usingOption
or similar. Andnullptr_t
doesn't help with this at all.Not sure I follow you...
Depends on your perspective. It's convenient to lean on type checking to avoid a whole class of bugs. You can see this either as avoiding NULL or use your type system to flag misuses.
C#'s
null
keyword matches the monadic approach I mentioned earlier. Nullable types work as aMaybe
monad. It's the same concept shoehorned differently due to the different paths taken by these languages.as far as I know, C# don't have proper ergonomic monadic bind as in F# (computation expression), Haskell (do expression), and Ocaml (let*), but I could be wrong.
Correct.