Re: [boost] boost::nil

From: Douglas Gregor (gregod_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-06-08 12:21:17

On Friday 08 June 2001 12:47 pm, you wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Douglas Gregor wrote:
> > That's worse :(. Anything with "pointer" would be a mistake, IMHO. Maybe
> > "null" instead? Any objections to "null"?
>
> Why's that. I suppose I don't understand what you're trying to do with
> this nil. :)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Jeremy Siek                        www: http://www.lsc.nd.edu/~jsiek/
>  Ph.D. Candidate, IU B'ton          email: jsiek_at_[hidden]
>  Summer Manager, AT&T Research      phone: [phone]
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------

The 'IMHO' was perhaps the most important set of ASCII characters in the 
above message. It's really, really subjective :).

Nil/null is intended to mean "no value",  "empty", or "invalid value" and not 
"null pointer". "Null pointer" is reasonable when you're dealing with C++ 
pointers, shared_ptr, etc, but it is not quite as good for other cases. For 
instance, 'function' isn't a pointer, it's a container of zero or one 
function objects, so assigning "null_pointer" to it doesn't make much sense.
The empty set is often called "nil" or "null", and I'd like to pick up that 
meaning as well.

Besides, anything with "pointer" in it requires at least 7 characters to 
type. 'nil' is only three and 'null' is only four. 

        Doug