I thought about that, and even experimented with it, but if I use a Null Object I cannot write if( $elt->first_child) {...} anymore, I have to explicitely test for $elt->first_child->is_not_null everywhere, which I don't like, or I have to overload the boolean-ification of the objects, but I am not a fan of overloading, mostly for performance reasons.

I agree that what I ask for is syntactic sugar, but I think it is also quite a natural way to write code, so it might make sense to have this in the language. I like the idea of undef being the null object. Being able to have a false blessed reference would actually be even better, because in this case I would know to which class that flase value belongs.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Autoboxing: Yes or No? by mirod
in thread Autoboxing: Yes or No? by Ovid

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