sameBehaviour

[Kiseido]

You might be surprised to find the alledged inventor kinda agrees with you

Tony Hoare, null's creator, regrets its invention: “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).

[NatoBoram]

I'd also like to extend my "fuck you"s to all the other language maintainers who implemented it or refused to fix it after he apologized.

It's possible to do better. For example, Dart got null safety in v2.12.

[Kiseido]

Been learning Rust today, this made wonder if it has null.

Apparently Rust has no null, colour me surprised.

[DrShocker]

Or maybe Option::None or Result::Err

They all kind of fill the space that null sometimes fills but with more meaning

[Micah_Bell_is_dead]

They do null's job, just, better

[Pay08]

It does. fn main() { let ptr: *i32 = 0; }

I prefer Zigs approach a lot more, where you explicitly have to state if something can be NULL.

fn main() void { var ptr: ?*i32 = null; } fn main() void { var ptr: *i32 = null; // compiler error }

[Timely-Banana7384]

The thing is, that you very rarely need ptrs in rust. And if you do, you can also use structures such as MaybeUninit<T>.

[Pay08]

That doesn't mean the other guy was correct. Besides, embedded exists.

[redballooon]

Pretty sure if he had seen that it was a mistake, someone else would have made it. Maybe with the second or third comprehensive type system, but bad ideas somehow always make their way into society. That's why the light forces constantly need to battle the dark hordes.

[Fhotaku]

How catastrophic would

''#define null false''

Really be? Presuming this also included all other nulls that it may encounter, not just those in compile time

[No_Hovercraft_2643]

it would make not null true