One more quick thought:
Holger Hoffstätte wrote:
> ..
> I don't know any good solution to this either, especially for cases where
> nulls are allowed and needed (like in Modeler, as you said); it's a
> difficult choice to make. Still, most of the time NPE avoidance (by e.g.
> gracefully doing nothing after a check) is IMHO preferrable to crashing or
> exception throwing.
One thing I found useful as a general rule-of-thumb for my own classes and
collection extensions for the last couple of years is that:
- methods which return single objects can return null to indicate 'no
result'
- methods which return a collection must never return null, but rather an
empty collection
I know these look trivial and kind of obvious, but they can really help
reduce a large number of bugs.
Holger
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Sat Dec 07 2002 - 18:47:41 EST