Your search for null pattern returned 3 result(s).
Now, working with Objective-C where nil eats messages, I realized that the code is more elegant, but it takes significant amount of time to debug it. You create if/else branches and breakpoints to trace the nil, then you fix the bug which causes it and erase the conditional code. You get your elegant code back and wait for another issue to arise later.
Yesterday I have rewritten 3600 LOC codebase in ActionScript as if there were “message eating” null in the core and the standard libraries (please see A Generalized Null Object Pattern by Nevin Pratt). I got a diff with just 100 lines removed and 180 lines updated. It is at most 7% code reduction.
It seems that “message eating” null neither produces considerably more elegant code, nor considerably more brittle code (in all cases ignoring null value is correct).
In sense of VM implementation, it might be easier to implement a classical “exception raising” null and use custom Null Pattern classes where appropriate.
Excellent write up about “message eating” Nil.