I agree I probably should have said strongly typed instead of safe, as yes, if you dereference a pointer to nil you are going to crash. That being said, I do think "possesses an untyped nil" is a pretty far cry from "not type checked at all". It's certainly much safer than languages like C or C++ which allow type punning, or Java, where both nullables and runtime exceptions associated with types are generally a more pernicious problem.