RE: field initializtion

Joe,  I hope you haven't had something serious happen.  The tone doesn't
sound like your usual helpful answers.

I've often wondered which is more readable.  If it's important that I know
whether something was initialized or not, then null would be a good
indicator that it has not.  If it's IMPORTANT that something not be used
until it is initialized, than I would assume I should throw an exception.
I'd probably use null if it's a correctable situation and I wanted to let
the programmer recover.  If it was a case where it could be any of a bunch
of values, then I'd opt for the ""... actually, I'd probably set it to
something like "*NOTSET*" to be a little more specific.

Nick


                                                                                
                                        
                    "Joe Pluta "                                                
                                        
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                    03/26/01 02:21 PM                                           
                                        
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---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: "Stone, Brad V (TC)" <bvstone@taylorcorp.com>
Reply-To: JAVA400-L@midrange.com
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 12:49:44 -0600

>I guess my main question is so I don't have to check for null.
<...snip...>
>will fail if field is null with a null pointer exception error.  So, to
>check for null or "" (basically a blank value) a little extra work is
>involved.

You'd rather bloat your code with unnecessary assignments than type, what?
A couple of seconds of keying max?  A couple of seconds which would
probably make your code more readable, because you should only be checking
for a null value when that's a REASONABLE return from the method.  You
should NOT be checking for null as a byproduct of a programming mistake,
but only as a legitimate test because the method returns null under certain
conditions.

> I know it's safer to check for not equals, but sometimes it's nicer
> to not do that.  Inevitably there will be a point where I will forget
> to check for null and my program will bomb at runtime with a null
> pointer exception. That's really what I want to avoid.

So you'd rather waste your end user's cycles assigning zero-length string
literals in order to be able to handle the situation where you screw up as
a programmer and have a null pointer.  A situation which should be caught
by you during unit testing, not by your end user, unless you're a believer
in the Microsoft "send it out and see what breaks" school of hacking.  Not
what I call a particularly good use of the language.


> But there's no *PSSR in Java.  ;)

Man, I'm getting sick of those cute little smileys.  There's something
better than a *PSSR, Brad, it's called an exception.  You can "try" and
"catch" for any exception that might occur.  I doubt that you'll want to
use it, though, because it requires (horrors!) actual coding.  Since it's
rare that you can actually recover from a *PSSR, about all they're good for
is to abend quietly after progamming mistakes without throwing up a hard
halt that might draw attention to the poor code that caused the error.
Exceptions are for people who actually think about their programming and
figure out how to handle errors ahead of time.

Joe
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