As per the docs, I have created a custom subclass of NSTextFieldCell with the sole purpose of overriding the method setUpFieldEditorAttributes:.
The docs don't mention any initializers for NSTextFieldCell's or its super class NSActionCell, but the documentation for NSCell explicitly mentions:
When subclassing NSCell you must implement all of the designated initializers. Those methods are: init, initWithCoder:, initTextCell:, and initImageCell:.
Now, since I don't really do anything in the custom subclass, except override an explicit override point in the Cocoa class, is there really any point in creating 4(!) initializers which only call their super class implementations?
Due to the verbose nature of the init... methods in Objective-C, this would quintuple the lines of code in the implementation, the number of comments to write (and read, for people into that sort of thing) and generally maintain.
I know that I could just have created those methods in the time it took me to write this, but I genuinely wonder if the existence of a method that just calls super makes any difference?
Edited to add:
I misread the NSTextFieldCell docs, which also state that all of the designated initializers must be implemented, but the question still stands - do 3 (init somehow disappeared as a designated initializer down the inheritance chain) initializers that just call super really make any difference?
In Apple's "DragNDropOutlineView" sample code, they implement "ImageAndTextCell", a custom subclass of NSTextFieldCell.
In it, the only initializer they override is
-(id) init
NSTextFieldCell apparently handles the others for you.
And, as you state, overriding a superclass's methods simply to call the superclass is a waste of time, as the runtime will do that if you don't override it anyway.