On 17 Apr '08, at 9:56 PM, Adam P Jenkins wrote:
Can you give an example of where invoking methods on nil objects would make sense in a non-error-path situation? I'm not trying to be argumentative here, I'm really curious to know what Objective-C idioms take advantage of the nil-swallows-messages behavior. Thank you.
I use this feature constantly, and a lot of other Obj-C code I've seen over the years does too. It saves an enormous number of 'if' statements and makes code a lot more concise and readable.
For example, in a typical dealloc method you release all of your object-pointer instance variables. You can just simply call [_foo release] instead of having to check it viz. "if(_foo) [_foo release]".
"[aString length]==0" tests for a nil or an empty string. Same goes for "[aCollection count]".
"newObj = [obj copy]" nicely handles the case where obj==nil; otherwise you'd have to do
if( obj )
newObj = [obj copy];
else
newObj = nil;
Yes, occasionally some result is unexpectedly nil and I don't discover
the problem immediately because subsequent calls to it are no-ops
instead of failing visibly. But I find this a much lesser problem than
having to deal with the extra code complexity that all the tests for
nil would add.
—Jens
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