A message sent to a nil object is perfectly acceptable in Objective-C, it’s treated as a no-op. There is no way to flag it as an error because it’s not an error, in fact it can be a very useful feature of the language.

From the docs:

Sending Messages to nil

In Objective-C, it is valid to send a message to nil—it simply has no effect at runtime. 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, then a message sent to nil returns 0 (nil), for example:

Person *motherInLaw = [[aPerson spouse] mother];

If aPerson’s spouse is nil, then mother is sent to nil and the method returns nil.

If the method returns 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.