Nil is really a Failure that doesn't throw. It indicates the absence of a value where there is one expected.
That is why Nil doesn't throw. If you want to indicate a soft failure, you should use fail(). If the chain of methods you mention are core methods, and one of them is returning Nil, then perhaps we have a bug. Could you elaborate on the situation where you encountered this? > On 3 Dec 2020, at 15:22, Konrad Bucheli via perl6-users > <perl6-us...@perl.org> wrote: > > > > On 02.12.20 15:55, Ralph Mellor wrote: >> On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 7:08 AM Patrick R. Michaud <pmich...@pobox.com> wrote: >>> Nil.any_non_existent method always seems to return Nil. I'm not sure where >>> this is documented >> It's near the top of the `Nil` doc page you linked: >>> Any method call on `Nil` of a method that does not exist ... will succeed >>> and return `Nil`. > > > OK, that is intentional and documented then. What is actually the rationale > for such a behaviour? > > For me it was an unexpected trap as I had a chain of methods which should do > some side effect. It all went fine only the side effect was not there. I then > figured out after some time that one of methods returned Nil and somehow > silently it did not do what I expected. > > Thanks > > Konrad >
