ItemView#parent doesn't return nil if there is no parent

[denisdefreyne]

ItemView#parent doesn't return nil if there is no parent. It returns an ItemView with @item=nil.

Reported by @cdlm.

[TheLonelyGhost]

Shouldn't this follow the null object pattern though? Returning nil isn't as telling as something like EmptyItemView, especially when debugging NoMethodError on NilClass...

[denisdefreyne]

I don’t think it makes sense to use the null object pattern here. None of the methods (#[], #identifier, #compiled_content, …) make sense for a NullItemView and they’d probably just raise an error, at which point having a nil instead of a NullItemView is more obvious and less work.