If you don't know the type which a name references (or whether it is nil), you have to figure that out before you call any methods on it, in an "external" way.

If you don't know the type which a name references (or whether it is nil), you have to figure that out before you call any methods on it, in an "external" way. So you have to do " == nil" or "typeof(mything) ==" or "isinstance(mything, type)". This is true for almost every method (except "nil?" in ruby.) Ruby has a lot of these special cases where there's a gimmicky way to do something which is not the general purpose way and is not the right way to think about that kind of logic. "== nil" is just as short as ".nil?" and isn't as wacky as intentionally calling methods of nil (and every other object needing to have this nil-specific interface).