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As a Java developer who is reading Apple's Objective-C 2.0 documentation: I wonder what " sending a message to nil " means - let alone how it is actually useful. Taking an excerpt from the documentation: There are several patterns in Cocoa that take advantage of this fact. The value returned from a message to nil may also be valid: If the method returns an object, any pointer type, any integer scalar of size less than or equal to sizeof(void*), a float, a double, a long double, or a long long, then a message sent to nil returns 0. If the method returns a struct, as defined by the Mac OS X ABI Function Call Guide to be returned in registers, then a message sent to nil returns 0.0 for every field in the data structure. Other struct data types will not be filled with zeros. If the method returns anything other than the aforementioned value types the return value of a message sent to nil is undefined. Has Java rendered my brain incapable of grokking the explanation above? Or is there something that I am missing that would make this as clear as glass? I do get the idea of messages/receivers in Objective-C, I am simply confused about a receiver that happens to be nil .

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