January 2017
Intermediate to advanced
420 pages
9h 25m
English
Content preview from Programming KotlinBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 7. Null Safety, Reflection, and Annotations
The dreaded null pointer exception is a familiar sight to anyone who has been a Java developer for any length of time. It is caused by a failure to handle null references correctly. Avoiding these errors has been the subject of many different ideas in many different programming languages. In this chapter, we'll review Kotlin's approach to null safety. Speaking at QCon, a conference organized by the developer blogging site InfoQ, Tony Hoare, the creator of the null pointer, said this:
"I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.