>why can't I specify, and have the compiler yell at me if I don't properly handle, "this pointer may never be null"
You can do so easily. A reference is a pointer that is never null.
You can do so easily. A reference is a pointer that is never null.
This isn't even theoretically true:
void blah(int &x) { x++; }
int main() {
int *x = NULL;
blah(*x);
}
So it will crash, whether that's undefined behaviour or not. The thing at issue here is that other languages have reference types that are more strictly statically guaranteed to be non-null. My point is that references are not a substitute for those, because holding them wrong is not only easy, it's extremely likely to happen in code of any reasonable complixity that mixes pointers and references (ie. almost all production C++ code).
>I would almost never write C++ …
Edit: nevermind, I missed the point! GP is saying he wouldn’t write C++ if C supported these features.