Pointer ofNull method naming

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

On 13/11/2019 02:48, Ty Young wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> After using Panama for awhile I've ran into more than a few situations 
> where I've ended up using Pointer.ofNull as a filler Pointer for data 
> I'm not actually interested in but have to pass a Pointer for it 
> anyway. After looking through the source code, it turns out that this 
> is not only convenient from my end as an API user but fairly fast and 
> memory efficient: the Pointer being returned is just a type casted 
> "BoundedPointer" singleton.
>
>
> Because of this wider use case than simply being a "null" Pointer, 
> IMO, "ofNull" isn't a very appropriate name and should be changed to 
> something that is more general in nature to fit its wider use cases. 
> An alternative would be something like "Pointer.ofTyped". This would 
> better name to convey the wider uses case of the Pointer.ofNull 
> functionality.
>
>
> Of course, I can see the argument being made to keep it as is since 
> many functions explicitly state to pass a null Pointer to get a size 
> or something first, in which case the Pointer.ofNull name is clearly 
> better. So instead of renaming, maybe it should just be documented 
> that it can be used for filler? Thoughts?

I'm ok with making the documentation more precise (I'm not sure I like 
ofTyped()). Can you please clarify a bit what you mean by 'filler' ? 
Like passing null ptr to a struct setter?

(p.s. in these cases we have been also discussing bringing back special 
treatment for Java null, so that null is re-interpreted to Pointer.ofNull)

Maurizio