Sorry, somehow I managed to forget that primitives existed for that brief moment. I was reacting to the realization that "null" is a bizarre special case for th

Sorry, somehow I managed to forget that primitives existed for that brief moment. I was reacting to the realization that "null" is a bizarre special case for the type system. I was wrong on reinitializing references as well. Thanks for pointing that out. As far as const pointers, I meant that they were unlikely to be null, since they would have to be initialized to null. Of course, then I realized that you could easily assign them to another null pointer that you didn't realize was null. Not a good day for me, but I don't think it warrants that kind of snarkiness. To my credit, please reread the part where I said "there is actually no such thing as a null reference."