I'm curious if anyone knows the rationale behind the decision to make
sending messages to nil be a no-op in ObjC. I've used a number of
other OO languages, including C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, and
Javascript, and in all of them, trying to invoke a method on whatever
their equivalent of nil is produces a runtime error of some sort. In
practice, I've found Obj-C's practice of ignoring method calls to nil
to be just annoying, since it masks bugs unless you turn on
NSZombiesEnabled. I can imagine that sometimes it would be
convenient to have some kind of message sink which just accepts and
ignores all messages, but why not just have a special NSSink class for
that instead of making nil behave that way?
I know there's no chance of this feature of the language changing at
this point. I'm just wondering if there's some good rationale for it
that I'm not thinking of. Thanks,
Adam
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