Dan Byström’s Bwain

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.

• With Zwei.Drei.Vier.Links()
• Before the idea gets stored in /dev/null …

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:

I knew it was a good idea!!! 🙂