From a thread from a mailing list
http://altair.cs.oswego.edu/mailman/private/concurrency-interest/2006-May/002486.html
Joshua Bloch josh at bloch.us
Fri May 12 12:22:06 EDT 2006
|concurrency-interest| Handling Null Values in ConcurrentHashMap
Doug,
On 5/12/06, Doug Lea <dl at cs.oswego.edu> wrote:
> Further digressing: I personally think that allowing
> nulls in Maps (also Sets) is an open invitation for programs
> to contain errors that remain undetected until
> they break at just the wrong time. (Whether to allow nulls even
> in non-concurrent Maps/Sets is one of the few design issues surrounding
> Collections that Josh Bloch and I have long disagreed about.)
I have moved towards your position over the years. It was probably a
mistake to allow null keys in Maps and null elements in Sets. I'm
still not sure about Map values and List elements.
In other words, Doug hates null more than I do, but over the years
I've come to see it as quite troublesome.
Josh
I'm not trying to pass on more troublesome suggestions :-) but "null" in caches sucks to have to write for, and it'd be good to be rid of them. Or at least some of them.
