Re: [Chicken-users] New immediate values (was: DBI)

[Thomas Chust]

On 29. Februar 2008 21:40:40 -0500 John Cowan <address@hidden> wrote:

> Thomas Chust scripsit:
>
> > [...]
> > Of course I don't want to have the same typing mess as in Java in
> > CHICKEN  and I do think the whole practice of having nullable reference
> > types (by  default) is questionable. I just don't think it is completely
> > canonical  that the type of NULL should be disjoint from every other
> > type, especially  if you think of types as being sets (or classes) of
> > objects.
>
> I do think of types as being named sets of objects (named, because then
> there are only denumerably many types).

So if you considered NULL as being a marker for the absence of any real 
value, its type would be the empty set which is a subset of every other 
type.

This is not the only possible interpretation of NULL, though, and whether 
it is a useful one may depend on the situation ;-)

> > If Foo.bar is a static method this will work just fine ;-)
>
> Yup.  But did you deduce that from first principles, or had you seen
> it before?

Well, the way I remembered the Java language specification it seemed 
logical to me that it should work, so I tried whether it really did ;-)

Nevertheless I think it is pretty bad practice to call a static method on 
an instance instead of the class itself...

cu,
Thomas

--
Murphy's Law is recursive.  Washing your car to make it rain doesn't work.