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Yeah, it's part of Scala's type system, too - (Option, and Some or None. Better language designers go to great lengths to make simple things like null values we

Yeah, it's part of Scala's type system, too - (Option, and Some or None. Better language designers go to great lengths to make simple things like null values well covered). Python will throw a fatal error and exits on reference to a nonexistent Dictionary key, but PHP blithely fills in the value with something falsy and continues. I'd rather be using Python too, but for some apps we have to work with a lot of PHP legacy code, so I do what I can.

steve-howard 15y ago
To be fair, Python doesn't throw a fatal error. It throws an Exception, which most people know to handle. The idiom is use a try/except block, but if you're clever you can usually avoid the need. Scala borrows the option types from SML (or, at least, SML has them and is much older). I love SML for its strict semantics (if something passes through the type system it most likely works as expected), but sadly design really doesn't inform platform choice (case in point: C++ is still common. I don't hate it as much as some people do, but it can't be said to be particularly well designed).