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Tony Hoare called null his billion dollar mistake[1] for good reason. It’s especially remarkable given that Mr. Hoare is easily one of the finest computing scie
by User23 5y ago
Tony Hoare called null his billion dollar mistake[1] for good reason. It’s especially remarkable given that Mr. Hoare is easily one of the finest computing scientists ever. Even the most brilliant can get it wrong. And only the most brilliant will admit it. Hats off to Sir Tony.
[1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill...
- KMag 5y agoHe said that he knew it was a kludge at the time, but it was seductively easy to implement... just add a special case to the type checker so that if the type being assigned to a reference is wrong, allow it if it's null. Properly working nullable and non-nullable references (or making optionality and references orthogonal concepts) would have been a much deeper change to the language and the compiler.