From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2005-05-06T16:15:10+09:00
Subject: Re: RCR 303: nil should accept missing methods and return nil

Hi,

In message "Re: RCR 303: nil should accept missing methods and return nil"
    on Fri, 6 May 2005 12:51:00 +0900, John Carter <john.carter@tait.co.nz> writes:

|Be careful about exactly what is being asked for and what has been done 
|before. I once developed an OOP system were all objects would respond to 
|all undefined messages by doing nothing. I rapidly changed that to an 
|error condition as in that case the complaint that it hid bugs was valid.

I know Objective-C's nil works like that.  I once developed an OOP
system (which was an early version of Ruby) where nil would respond to
all undefined messages by doing nothing.  In production code, it does
nothing bad, since any production code should not raise an exception.
Rather it introduces new scheme of error handling.

But during development, it can hide bugs.  It is very difficult to
distinguish correct error handling by ignoring unknown message, and
uncontrolled unintentional misbehavior caused by bugs.  It's against
the principle of "early death".

Your proposal worth something, I think.  But it's not going to be seen
in the near future of Ruby.

							matz.