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A comment on Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake. Parent comment

Re:Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake by jrockway on Saturday January 11, 2020 @10:06AM (#22020196)
The "no null" case in traditional languages is just "int" instead of "*int". All values inside an "int" are valid integers.

Certainly it's problematic to use the same language primitive to mean "a pointer" and "this might be empty", but it's what people use them for in every language that has pointers (that I've used anyway).

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Re:Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake by pornel on Saturday January 11, 2020 @10:19PM (#22024244)
That conflates pass by value/by reference distinction with being optional.

This means you need magic values for "maybe int" with no help from the type system. And you can't express "there's definitely an int at that address".

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