I don't think using nil to represent uninitialized data is a major issue-- if it were possible to catch uninitialized but queried variables at compile-time, tha

I don't think using nil to represent uninitialized data is a major issue-- if it were possible to catch uninitialized but queried variables at compile-time, that could be an improvement, but we want to give the programmer control to declare and initialize variables separately. I agree the second case is a little silly.