Re: Non-nullable properties

Hi! > I agree with you. If someone really wants to have an "uninitialized" field > on purpose, they should do that using the correct type declaration, i.e.: > > ?MyType $myNullable = null; > > When this was started I asked if it was possible to check types right after > object has been constructed, but they said it was inefficient to do so. > If this is still true, then I'm ok with checking on first access instead. I > don't want even more overhead from runtime type checking. > This is definitely not as bad as the "billion dollar mistake" though. The > error still happens, but in a different place. In Java, avoiding these kinds of errors - when the property is not initialized - is almost trivial, and that's not what "billion dollar mistake" is about. Lack of initialization for a final value (which is a frequent case with property values) is detected by the compiler, and most IDEs/analysis tools would alert of lack of initialization for non-final value too. The problem is with usage on null as a substitution for no value/error/unknown value and this value bleeding out into parts of the code that don't know how to handle this situation. -- Stas Malyshev smalyshev@gmail.com