From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2005-05-07T02:28:18+09:00
Subject: Re: RCR 303: nil should accept missing methods and return nil

On 5/5/05, John Carter <john.carter@tait.co.nz> wrote:
>> This would be a big change to behaviour and a lot of existing
>> programs could have problems with it. Because integers already
>> have a to_i(), its possible to do this...
> 
> If there were a lot of programs deliberately doing
> 
> begin
>   # some complex calculation
> rescue NoMethodError => details
>   # Do some valid functionality, not just error handling
> end
> 
> I would agree with out.

> If they are not doing that, then the program would just crash
> totally. My change would change the behaviour from crashing, to
> Doing The Right thing.

Um. I think that the point being made is that crashing, in this
case, *is* doing the right thing. If nil respondedd to all methods
silently, how would you ever know when your method got the *wrong*
data?

I said this on the RCR comment area, but PDF::Writer is *correct* to
blow up when it gets nil. Without this, there are things that I
could not *possibly* have debugged. With the silent eating of
messages, the generated PDF files would be incorrect -- invalid --
and there's not a damned thing I could do to tell where the problem
is.

I don't really know what to say to this -- this will turn a correct
behaviour into a completely invalid behaviour.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca