On 21 November 2013 19:10, Sean P. DeNigris <sean@clipperadams.com> wrote:

> mm.. well, i prefer that fairly common would be to pass meaningful data back and forth rather than
> dummy values.
I don't understand... when I say "fairly common", I mean that in the C world, it seems common to use null-passing for optional arguments. I'm not saying that it's a good idea, but we don't have control over that, so...

if it would be just C world :)

Another reason for not making this default, because checking for nil is one extra check

for every piece of generated code which expects pointer, and i hope you agree that while null-value is fairly common, non-null is much more common.

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> For that best solution, IMO, would be to use 2 methods which call same function,
> but one uses 'nil' in function signature (and therefore method doesn't takes extra argument),
> while other takes extra argument but doesn't accepts nils, for sure.
Yuck ;)

but this is quite common in smalltalk isn't? Look at Canvas - good example of overusing it i.e.:

drawThis: withThis: andThat:
drawThis: withThis: andThat: andAlsoThis:
drawThis: withThis: andThat: andAlsoThis: andAlsoThat:

yes, sometimes it looks like unnecessary protocol bloating, but i think for our case it is well justified.

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Cheers,
Sean

View this message in context: Re: NativeBoost: Documentation Suggestion and Question

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Igor Stasenko.