I'm sure there are uses for it; in this case, since making nil pointers not work would require extra rules, it doesn't seem worth doing. A suggestion I saw on r

I'm sure there are uses for it; in this case, since making nil pointers not work would require extra rules, it doesn't seem worth doing. A suggestion I saw on reddit was to use a different word for "nil" for interfaces ("unset" or something), which would make the gotchya have less bite. And I wasn't trying to say nil-to-interface violated anything real, just that it violated natural-to-make-but-actually-untrue assumptions (which is I guess pretty much the definition of a gotchya): If we have a = nil b = a it's natural (but incorrect) to assume that we have b == nil Basically, I agree with you that the syntax is being poorly suggestive of the semantics. I like the "unset" suggestion because then we'd have: a = nil b = a which wouldn't falsely suggest b == unset Too late now, though.