> ...because it indicates the absence of a value, which is a special case. But that's exactly the problem -- it's special, meaning it's only useful for certain

> ...because it indicates the absence of a value, which is a special case. But that's exactly the problem -- it's special, meaning it's only useful for certain situations. An ideal type system would provide compile-time guarantees, rather than having to wait for users to report issues. A type system which A) allows you to define variables as non-nullable and B) requires a null guard before every dereference of nullable variables eliminates this entire class of bug. What on earth is wrong with that? EDIT: > Seriously? A "nullpo crash" is one of the more trivial things to debug Even if this were true [0], wouldn't it be easier if such a crash was just never even possible? [0] which it's not - all a nullpo stack trace tells you is that something important didn't happen, at some point before this