EG meeting, 2022-05-04

[John Rose]

On 4 May 2022, at 11:36, Kevin Bourrillion wrote:

>> - "Foo / Foo.ref is a backward default": Kevin and Brian argued that we
>> should prefer treating B3 classes as reference-default, with something like
>> '.val' to opt in to a primitive value type
>>
>
> I will say that I have not personally found the opposition to this change
> to be nearly as strong as the principal arguments in favor. It creates a
> very valuable uniformity in how things work. I hope it goes this way.

(This is hard to parse without that last little sentence.  I think I agree.)

For one thing, you can instantly see, by inspection of the source code,
whether a given variable permits null.

That advantage holds for simple variable declarations, array declarations.
Maybe even with generic type vars.

For another, Integer can just be itself, with Integer.val ≡ int.