I’ve been playing around with iPhone development and I have to say — I love the Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language. It’s got all the simple goodness of C but with very nice OOP extensions. I’m not sure to what extent, if any, it’s used besides in the Appleverse, but it’s nice and I like it. Here is a tiny example:
1: NSMutableArray *particles = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
2: [particles addObject:newParticle];
3: ...
4: Particle *p;
5: for(n=0;n<[particles count]; ++n ) {
6: p = [particles objectAtIndex:n];
7: [p setName:[self ownerName]];
In line 1 we see the Obj-C way of initializing an object. First we send an alloc message to the NSMutableArray class and then send an init message to the object returned by it. We then assign it to a pointer variable of the appropriate type. In line 2 we add a new object newParticle to the particles array. Later, at line 4 we create a C-style pointer to a Particle object and in line 5 we find out the number of objects in the array particles by sending it a count message. In line 6 we pull out a specific object from the array and in line 7 we send the setName message to our Particle object (the normal “setter” for the instance variable name) and send as a parameter the value from the “getter” of the class we are in (self) for the instance variable ownerName.
You can see there is an odd mix of traditional C and object stuff.
It’s also quite flexible. For example, if you have an instance variable named isEnabled you can refer to that variable in 3 different ways:
isEnabled = NO;
self.isEnabled = NO;
[self setIsEnabled:NO];
In the first two we access the variable directly and in the third we call the setter method. As we saw in lines 1 and 7 above, you can nest these as much as you like.
self.currentParticle.size = 10;
[[self currentParticle] setSize:10];
But at any time you can whack in some normal ol’ C:
size = (sizeFactor *2.0*arc4random() / (float)UINT_MAX)+sizeFactor;
Pretty cool.
lolife 
Good point.
It seems like a lot of programmers cling to the dot notation. I much prefer the message-passing syntax, myself.
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Yeah, I’ve been getting into Obj-C for a little while now. The dynamic nature of how objects and messaging work together is very flexible.
I’d just like to make one little correction to your example:
isEnabled = NO;
self.isEnabled = NO;
[self setIsEnabled:NO];
In this case, only the first line is accessing the data field directly. Both of the second two lines are using the setter method, and the ‘dot’ syntax can be used interchangeably with the setXXX syntax.
This is an important distinction, as the set method may be doing more than simply assigning the value, and will also allow other objects to be notified if they have registered to be informed of changes to the value (KVO). This is done automatically by the frameworks, but won’t happen if you assign the value directly to the data member itself.
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