Would it be useful to be able to provide method return value for null objects?
For a List the null return values might be:
get(int) : null
size() : 0
iterator() would be an empty iterator
That would allow the following code that has less null checks.
List items = null;
if(something) {
items = ...
}
for(int index = 0; index < items.size(); index++) {
Object obj = items.get(index);
}
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2 comments:
I think if you do that you break what null is really meant to represent (i.e. a pointer with a reference to nothing), I often use the following idiom though:
final List items = new MyListImplementation();
if(something) {
items.addAll(otherThing);
}
for(int index = 0; index < items.size(); index++) {
Object obj = items.get(index);
}
You could still check for null and the defaults would only be set when explicitly set by the class/interface of the variable type. I just think there are times when I want to ignore nulls.
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