Null safety

[Christian Edward Gruber]

Hey all,

I need to take a bit to finish the null safety proposal - which
hopefully starts to get the idea across.

In the mean-time, however, Piotr Zielinski from Google twigged me
onto some work in Java 7, using the new annotation support (more
locations can be annotated) and post-processors to actually do null
checking as a post-compilation process. I'm going to dig into it
because it may have good implementation approaches for null-safe
checking in the noop compiler, but more interestingly, our translator
could conceivably translate into java code, but as a processing step
before it reports success, could use the Java7 crap to simulate what
the ultimate noop compiler will do.

For the interested, the work is here: http://types.cs.washington.edu/jsr308

cheers,
Christian.