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Refactoring with C#
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British computer scientist, Tony Hoare, is generally credited as the inventor of the null reference in programming. In 2008, he famously apologized for it, calling it his “billion-dollar mistake.” This was due to the countless bugs and crashes that have occurred in various programming languages when code attempted to interact with variables currently holding null values. While I can’t fault Tony Hoare, nulls can certainly be dangerous.
In .NET, this comes in the form of a NullReferenceException
error, as we saw earlier in this chapter. You get a NullReferenceException
error any time you attempt to invoke a method or evaluate a property on a variable that currently holds a null value.
Before C# 8, developers needed to be explicitly aware that any reference type could hold a null value and write conditional logic, such as the following code:
if (flight != null) { Console.WriteLine($"Flight {flight.Id}: {flight.Status}"...