>You don't need it for reference types, because those can just return a null.
The point is that it is not necessarily correct to conflate the nullability of the parse with the correctness of the parse. If I wanted to parse a string into a Foo, null might be a valid value for a successful parse to return, say because the rule is that the string "(null)" maps to a null Foo.
The point is that it is not necessarily correct to conflate the nullability of the parse with the correctness of the parse. If I wanted to parse a string into a Foo, null might be a valid value for a successful parse to return, say because the rule is that the string "(null)" maps to a null Foo.