Re: [RFC] Nullsafe calls

Josh Watzman wrote: > However, for a lot of failures, I don't feel that exceptions are > appropriate. I tend to only use them for exceptional behavior -- > usually, some failure that needs to be propagated up a few levels up > the stack, to an appropriate error boundary. This doesn't necessarily > mean a completely unrecoverable error, but it's *locally* > unrecoverable. For things that are completely recoverable, returning > null might be more appropriate and more lightweight, and then this > nullsafe operator would be useful at that point. FWIW, there is a third option: instead of returning null, return a null object[1]. That causes (slightly) more overhead, but it's quite flexible and works rather nicely without requiring the (IMO) ugly ?-> nor exception handling. Consider a non-existent user "foo": User::find('foo')?->getName() // returns null User::find('foo')->getName() // could also return '' or 'Unknown user' [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Object_pattern> -- Christoph M. Becker