Yes. That's why a good language makes this explicit in the type. For example in Scala, this example would be that user is of type Option[User] and the name pro

Yes. That's why a good language makes this explicit in the type. For example in Scala, this example would be that user is of type Option[User] and the name property would also be Option[String] for example. Then to safely get the name would be: user.flatMap(_.name) and the resulting type would be Option[String] Which would then carry on the info that you don't know for certain that you know the name.