[spankalee]

There is room for both, but it should be explicit in my opinion. Dart for instance has null safe operators

  // not null-safe:
  foo.bar.baz();

  // null-safe:
  foo?.bar?.baz();

If your type system also does null tracking, then you can see where you might have null values and decide to use the null-safe operators.

[samcal]

Swift has the same syntax for its nullable types. It's also conceptually similar to Haskell's monadic bind over the Maybe type, where your example would look like

    foo >>= bar >>= baz

The nice thing about this approach is that (>>=) is not specific to the Maybe type, and can be extended to other data structures, include one that passes along error messages in the "null" type through the sad path if it encounters them. This would be in the (Either a) monad.