On May 29, 2011, at 12:57, Ken Thomases wrote:
> But it's important to recognize that there are good arguments on both sides
> and the design decision involved a tradeoff. In any case, it doesn't seem to
> me that that design decision necessarily implies that calling super with a
> nil self should also be safe. The two can be considered separately. In this
> case, it was actually good that it crashed, since Jerry's code had a bug and
> it was found earlier than it might otherwise have been. Put another way,
> what nice patterns would be enabled if it were safe to message super when
> self is nil? In the absence of any, the argument tilts heavily in favor of
> disallowing it.
I don't disagree with this rationale -- it may be a good idea. But there's a
question of what's in the API (or runtime documentation in this case) contract.
What I read here:
developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/Chapters/ocObjectsClasses.html
is this:
> Sending Messages to nil
>
> In Objective-C, it is valid to send a message to nil—it simply has no effect
> at runtime.
That's pretty unequivocal.
The significance of calling it a bug is that someone might actually file a bug
report, which might result in Apple either allowing nil in the super case or
changing the documentation to match the actual behavior. I don't care which is
the outcome, but I think one of those things should happen.
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