To me it's about the existence of the nil pointer itself. If there is a pointer, it is guaranteed to be valid by the type system. The other case (which would

To me it's about the existence of the nil pointer itself. If there is a pointer, it is guaranteed to be valid by the type system. The other case (which would be represented by a nil or null pointer in other languages) is represented by the "None" type. There's no null pointer to dereference (and no way to blow up).