[Grace-core] Pomona Colloquium & meetings

[Marco Servetto]

>>I had a number of complaints about dropping null from the language - they didn't see the advantage as we still detect uninitialized >>variables.  I'll need to have a good example ready for such objections in the future.
you could say that is like using a proxy pattern: the get method can
trow exception on reading, thus "null" can never be propagated, and,
as example, no method could ever receive a "null" argument.

>> One student also wanted to require that all variables be initialized on declaration.
>>I'll need another example ready to show why that can't always be done (at least not gracefully).
The most common example is where circular initialization is required.
(I'm working of something to solve this somehow... in my hearth I
agree with that student.)