Dylan 'nullable' types [Was: Close review of Language Overview whitepaper]

[P T Withington]

On 2007-11-14, at 19:22 EST, Graydon Hoare wrote:

> (As far as I can tell -- not being a dylan hacker -- dylan doesn't  
> even
> go as far as having a global sentinel type like nil)

The Dylan equivalent of a nullable type is a union of your type with a  
singleton that acts as the sentinel.  Most often a singleton of the  
boolean false value is used.  So there is a macro `false-or(<type>)`  
that expands to `type-union(<type>, singleton(#f))`.  This works for  
any type other than a nullable boolean.  Because any value other than  
#f coerces to true in a boolean context, #f is very similar to nil.   
I've never known anyone to need a nullable boolean.  (Although I have  
seen whacky es3 code that uses true/false/null as a sloppy 3-valued  
enumeration -- with attended bug reports when null is passed expecting  
it to behave like false.)

I must say, coming from Dylan, es3's undefined _and_ null seem like  
overkill... but we're stuck with them now!