Why is event null not handled by delegate

Question

When calling a delegate you always have to check if it is not null. This is an often cause for errors. Since delegates are more or less just a list of functions, I would assume, that this could have been easily checked by the delegate itself.

Does anybody know, why it has been implemented as it is?

Answer 1

This may be stating the obvious, but you can declare your event to point to a no-op handler and then you don't need to check for null when invoking.

public event EventHandler MyEvent = delegate { };

Then you can call the handlers pointed to by MyEvent without checking for null.