Re: Warnings and collections
"Roedy Green" <my_email_is_posted_on_my_website@munged.invalid> wrote in
message news:ptiv421ag02vfla27oac0sdtmlaba44405@4ax.com...
On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:28:07 +0100, "Chris Uppal"
<chris.uppal@metagnostic.REMOVE-THIS.org> wrote, quoted or indirectly
quoted someone who said :
Wow! An actual, real live, bug found by generics -- I'm impressed.
Perhaps the most frustrating Java programming assignment I ever did
was a classified ad system. I was handed code with hundreds of
collections all with Generic Map type, along with collection
assignment Had the code been done with Generics, it would have been a
snap.. Tracking down just what was supposed to go in each collection
was a nightmare.
On top of that there was the matter of null pointers. Where are they
valid and where do you need empty strings?
Off and on, I've been playing with the idea that there could be two kinds of
references in Java: those that can contain "null" as a value and those that
can't. Assigning null to a non-nullable reference would be illegal.
Assigning a nullable reference to a non-nullable one would require a cast
and might result in an NPE then and there, so that the NPE points to the
logical error, rather than occurring later when some perfectly innocent code
trips over the null pointer.