This is fair. I was thinking of this in the context of GC'd languages, where one instead has nullable types (or sentinel null values). Eg. Java, C#, Python, Rub

This is fair. I was thinking of this in the context of GC'd languages, where one instead has nullable types (or sentinel null values). Eg. Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Scala. The C++ case where a distinction between `foo = null` and `*foo = null` exists is indeed much closer to a an option type. You're right to point it out.