I would also support this. There's a myriad reasons why something may
return NULL or FALSE when you expect it to return an object, some of them
even legitimate. Any function/method whose documentation line is "returns
the foo object, or NULL if someone screwed up and there isn't one" is
perfectly reasonable in many cases, IMO, but makes all chains a potential
fatal. An exception would make a lot more sense, and allow us to
centralize handling of such "exceptional" cases rather than throwing
if-checks everywhere. (Which is exactly what exceptions are for.)
Seems to me this change would encourage bad habits (breaking the law of
Demeter) which would personally put me against it.
Regards
Peter