> If Tony Hoare hadn't made that design choice then somebody else somewhere would have.
Not necessarily. If Hoare had not used null references he might have invented nullables to fill the need and others would have replicated that.
Not necessarily. If Hoare had not used null references he might have invented nullables to fill the need and others would have replicated that.
I think this can be supported by the fact that these fancy language features have been successfully implemented for decades and are only now showing up in mainstream languages.
Neither "simplicity" nor "performance" were huge factors in Algol's design.
Nonsense.
The entire point of Hoare's design was to have type safe references, which C pointers most definitely are not. The entire point of references was that they not be pointers.