Re: Undefined variables returning nil

[William Sumner <prestonsumner@...>]

On Mar 19, 2013, at 6:24 PM, William Ahern <william@25thandClement.com> wrote:

> You keep asserting that this is unsafe behavior. Please elaborate.

An incorrect variable name bug executes silently, which can propagate undetected through a program. It can lead to other problems, such as unintentional array "holes", incorrect results from the length operator, and time spent searching for the origin of the problem in large codebases. Because user-implemented solutions have been created to address the problem, as well as static analyzers, it would seem preferable to make the language have the safe behavior by default. I consider it unsafe because it's a detectable bug that the language does not report to the user.

Preston