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0 pointscballard10y ago0 comments

"Decent" is being very kind to any language that has a type system where every reference type is implicitly a Maybe (okay, Scala exists).

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4 comments · 1 top-level

sievebrain10y ago· 3 in thread

Go and Scala also allow every pointer to be null, no? Scala has an option type, but so does Java 8. Defining one in C# is easy.

But there is Ceylon, Kotlin, Clojure, whatever. Kotlin uses ? suffixes to define if something is optional. And at least the code interops nicely. You can inherit a huge Java codebase and slowly convert the code over. No such luck with Go. Unless you're converting into C!

cballardOP10y ago

C# and Java optionals aren't very useful, since they would be reference types themselves, and thus could be null!

I would submit Rust and Swift as "decent" type systems, if Haskell is the standard for "good". They do nullability correctly, but lack HKTs.

jdmichal10y ago

C# has non-nullable value types via the `struct` keyword. And C# in fact already has a defined optional type to handle this; it's called `Nullable`. [0]

[0] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b3h38hb0%28v=vs.110...

krotton10y ago

In Scala, Option[Whatever] may also be null. The difference is that it's considered "some Java compatibility leftover" and never exploited by any sane piece of code.

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