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I have never before taken this path to request help on a "bug" before,
but either I'm nuts or the person who reviewed my bug is, well, not sure
what to say.
My bug (Bug ID# 7726255) was just closed with a "Behaves as Normal".
This bug is against the "Cocoa Fundimentals Guide", in the section
talking about ObjectiveC 2.0 messaging.
On page 70 of the PDF, there is this paragraph:
-----
In your program’s control-flow statements, you can test for the presence
(or absence) of the appropriate negative literal to determine how to
proceed. For example, the following while statement from the
SimpleCocoaTool code implicitly tests the word object variable for the
presence of a returned object (or, in another sense, the absence of nil):
while (word = [enm nextObject]) { printf("%s\n", [word UTF8String]);
}
In Objective-C, you can often send a message to nil with no ill effects.
Return values from messages sent to nil are guaranteed to work as long
as what is returned is typed as an object.
------
When I read this I jumped out of my chair - I had just that day revised
hundreds of lines my company's old code to tidy up statements like
"if(foo && [foo count] != 0)" to "if([foo count])"! So, I cracked open
my ObjectiveC 2 guide, just to be sure I hadn't completely misunderstood
nil messaging.
Of course, what I found was that in 2.0 methods that return ints,
floats, etc are all guaranteed to work with nil messaging (the number of
supported types increased dramatically in 2.0).
What I had hoped my ug would prompt a revision such as: "Return values
from messages sent to nil are guaranteed to work as long as what is
returned is typed as an object or an integral or floating scalar (refer
to ObjC2.0 Guide for a full discussion)."
My purpose in entering the bug was that the statement "messages sent to
nil are guaranteed to work as long as what is returned is typed as an
object." is extremely misleading to people most in need of correct
guidance, noobies.
Frankly, I was shocked when this bug was closed. My sincere hope is that
some Apple employee reading this will see this issue as I do and do
something about it.
David
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