this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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Empty string used to be like my own version of null pointer.
Dark times…
Like -1 for an Int nil value.
Which language can nil an
int?Groovy will automatically convert integers into objects, as it sees fit. And one such case is when you assign
nullto an integer.There's some more languages, which try to treat primitive types like objects, to make them more consistently usable. As I understand, nullability is a big part of the reason why it can't be solved with syntactic sugar, so presumably this would be possible in all those languages.
If I'm not mistaken, Ruby is another one of those languages.
Groovy is pretty wild. It's like, honey, you need me to make this a BigInteger for you? I got you honey, don't even worry about it.
Yeah, I kind of respect the stance, because it knows what it wants to be, but I also wrap number types into a separate data type to document that maybe you shouldn't multiply a port number by the wheel count and pass that into the temperature parameter, because I want more fine-grained typing, not one-size-fits-all.
I love the idea of "tiny types" like that and wish they were built into more languages.
Just cast it. /s
I believe, that would mean that any 0 is equivalent to the null pointer, since the null pointer is just memory address 0...
Not exactly "memory address 0"; there be dragons there. https://c-faq.com/null/index.html
In C that would make sense yes.