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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!
 
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The Red Baron
Jan 10, 2005

Janin posted:

Oh good, so all I have to do to make reference code safe is...treat every reference as a magical pointer?


The problem is I'm working on code written by people who have been told "pointers are not safe, don't use them, always use references, they are safe!". I wouldn't mind the feature so much if it came with some way to indicate to future readers when it was in use. It's the combination of "any of these hundred function calls could validly change my local stack" and "I don't know which ones".

If the people who worked on the code before you couldn't understand the semantics of references (which is scary enough by itself), I can hardly see how that's the language's fault any more than it would be Java's fault if a programmer couldn't understand the "reference by value" passing that has already been discussed ad nauseum (and I've seen several people who've struggled with exactly that. They were programming 101 students, though). If you violate a function's preconditions or an invariant of the language itself, your program is in an inconsistent state by definition.

Allowing a null reference to be passed is no more a design flaw of C++ than allowing NULL to be passed to strlen is a design flaw of C. They're both precondition violations and will most likely have the same outcome.

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The Red Baron
Jan 10, 2005

 PHP 5.3: now with goto

* # ¿ Jul 2, 2009 00:58
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!