Null-restricted types: Why so complicated?

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

On 19/01/2024 19:34, John Bossons wrote:
> it's bad practice to specify arrays of null-restricted elements except 
> where you're sure undefined elements are never read before being defined

Counter-argument: it is relatively common to create e.g. an array of 
ints, which is then only populated sparsely. When you create an int[], 
you can read its elements (and get a zero out), you don't get any 
exception. Thanks to having defined values "the right way", that's 
exactly what you get when you read a freshly minted V![]

(Subtle bonus point: because of this, `int` is effectively an alias for 
`!Integer`).

We could have designed this differently, but then we would have ended up 
in a place which was neither classes, nor primitives.

Maurizio