Why don't I need to check if references are invalid/null?

Question

Reading http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/references.html, it says:

In general, references should always be valid because you must always initi

Answer 1

The short is that it could happen -- but if it does, you have a serious design problem. You also have no real way of detecting it. The answer is to design your program to prevent it from happening, not trying to build some sort of check that won't really work (because it can't).