I’ve previously written a couple of blog posts on an idea of mine: the possibility to have language support for avoiding null reference exceptions.
I had planned to close the matter down in an article claiming that a “with” keyword could be implemented in C# with the ability to take a different path when the “with”-expession couldn’t be evaluated because a null reference exception would occur trying to do so.
Example:
with ( Order order = a.b.c.d.e )
{
...
}
else
{
// either a or b or c or d or e is null and therefore
// it would be pointless to enter the "with" block
}
Well, now it turns out that I’m not the only one having felt the need for something like this. It is implemented in the Cω research language:
| Cω takes this one step further with the behavior of returning null instead of throwing a NullReferenceException on accessing a field or property of a nullable type whose value is null. |
I knew it was a good idea!!! 🙂
Dan Byström's Bwain 