On Aug 30, 2008, at 10:31 PM, Jon Davis wrote:
So do no-ops exist solely for the sake of being there for
convention, i.e. "do this if you're implemented, ignore if not"?
I'd adjust two things about your wording.
First, a no-op method *is* implemented. It has an implementation that
happens to do nothing. This is a perfectly valid method implementation:
- (void)myBoringMethod
{
// Does nothing.
}
Second, I wouldn't say no-ops are there by convention. Rather,
they're part of the explicit design of how the program is supposed to
behave. If a method does nothing, why was it created at all? The
typical answer is either (a) it's a fallback behavior under certain
conditions (so it's only a no-op under those conditions), or (b) it's
a default behavior which can optionally be overridden by a subclass.
The case you saw, -[NSAutoreleasePool release], is an example of (a).
If you're using retain/release for memory management, the method does
something; it's not a no-op. If you recompile your code to use GC, -
release becomes a no-op. You can keep calling it in your code -- you
don't have to go remove all your calls to it -- but it will simply do
nothing.
As an example of case (b), there is a class called NSColorPicker with
a method called -attachColorList: that does nothing. The method will
get called and it will do nothing for a regular instance of
NSColorPicker. You can create a custom subclass of NSColorPicker
whose -attachColorList: method does something.
To see more examples of this second kind of no-op, you can Google for
this (enter the stuff inside the square brackets): ["does nothing"
override site:developer.apple.com].
Hope this helps,
--Andy
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