Null'Pointer'Exception...

[Vijay Vaddem]

Hi All,

Im sure there is no Pointers in Java...

So, Just wanted to know why the name Null'Pointer'Exception???


:roll:

[Jeroen Wenting]

there are pointers, you just can't declare them yourself.

[Vijay Vaddem]

Hi,

Can you give an example over this??


Regards,

Vijay

[Dirk Schreckmann]

You're not the first person to be surprised that a language without pointers has something called a NullPointerException.

I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that this is a bit of a misnomer, and that a better name for this type of Exception would probably have been NullReferenceException. (It's too late to change it, now.)

[Jeroen Wenting]

References are really pointers to objects.
But where a pointer can be directly manipulated (the dreaded pointer arithmetics in C), references cannot. Because of that no special syntax is needed to dereference them, the runtime environment/compiler/JVM understands that a call to the reference means to address the memory structure in the memory space referenced by the reference and not the raw memory itself.

Small but important distinction.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Here's a recent pontification on this very topic.