He 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 be

He 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.