On Apr 17, 2008, at 4:42 PM, Adam P Jenkins wrote:
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?
At one point in Xcode there was a build option that turned this feature off. I wonder where it went... Anyone know?
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