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A comment on The Logical Disaster of Null. Parent comment

Re:The Logical Disaster of Null by htgb on Thursday May 10, 2018 @02:33AM (#17036832)
Interesting, I haven't heard this argument before. So what is it about null that makes it more feasible here than for example option types/tagged unions?

Also, regarding your third point, IMO the question mark syntax in for example TypeScript and C# is fine.

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Re:The Logical Disaster of Null by annabellish on Thursday May 10, 2018 @03:54AM (#17037088)
Way back when when the JVM/CLR were being originally designed, I'm not sure that Option types as a concept were quite as proven, and both languages were trying to be "safe" languages that didn't have any complicated or new concepts in them. Optional types might not be that now, but they probably were then, when they were strictly in the domain of fairly academic languages.
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Re:The Logical Disaster of Null by ratmice on Thursday May 10, 2018 @07:14AM (#17037877)
I'm not entirely sure where or when it was introduced, the first mention of it I could find was May 1989 (pg 25)

ftp://ftp.cs.princeton.edu/reports/1989/220.pdf

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