On Mar 4, 2009, at 2:40 PM, Stuart Malin wrote:
On Mar 4, 2009, at 12:15 PM, cocoa-dev-requ...@lists.apple.com wrote:
In any case, and perhaps based purely on habit, I find it difficult
to
even write:
NSStatusItem statusItem = [[[NSStatusBar systemStatusBar]
statusItemWithLength:NSVariableStatusItemLength] retain];
...in favor of:
NSStatusBar *systemBar = [NSStatusBar systemStatusBar];
if (systemBar != NULL)
{
AFAIU(nderstand):
While nil and NULL may operate interchangeably (in most cases?),
semantically, they are not the same thing.
In your code fragment above, I believe most Cocoa programmers would
expect to see:
if (systemBar != nil) ....
NULL is used more to indicate a null value c pointer.
At one time I was under the impression they were defined differently:
nil being of type id, and NULL being a void*
But in trying to research this, I run across much conflicting info
and suspect perhaps this has either changed over time, and/or
depends on whether the use is in/with C++ or not. Perhaps some of
the experts on this list can provide some clarity....
Technically, nil and NULL are identical. As of Mac OS X 10.5, nil and
NULL are both defined as __DARWIN_NULL, which is handled specially by
the compiler for typechecking and a few C vs C++ corner cases.
Stylistically, you may prefer to distinguish nil and NULL as a C vs
Objective-C hint to the reader.
(Before 10.5, nil was defined as 0, which would have caused trouble
for 64-bit: sizeof(nil) != sizeof(id). There's also a Nil, which was
originally intended to be the nil class but is now mostly unused.)
--
Greg Parker gpar...@apple.com Runtime Wrangler
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