Lambda the Ultimate

inactiveTopic The Objective-C Language
started 5/4/2001; 11:13:37 AM - last post 5/4/2001; 1:01:33 PM
Chris Rathman - The Objective-C Language  blueArrow
5/4/2001; 11:13:37 AM (reads: 1006, responses: 1)
The Objective-C Language
Nice introductory article on Objective-C which has always been popular in the Mac and Next communities. In many ways, Objective-C is a cleaner OO extension to C, following the messaging of Smalltalk rather than the static typing of Simula. The downside is that you ought to be familiar with both C & Smalltalk before diving too far into the language.

I also recommend Apple's Intro to OOP and Objective-C as a good reference. Class Categories and Protocols are an interesting aspect to the language, allowing you to dynamically add methods to a base class on the fly.
Posted to OOP by Chris Rathman on 5/4/01; 11:18:10 AM

John Lawter - Re: The Objective-C Language  blueArrow
5/4/2001; 1:01:33 PM (reads: 625, responses: 0)
I have a copy of the NeXT/Apple Intro to OOP and Objective-C book. It's really quite good. In addition to covering the language itself, it does a nice job of covering the ideas behind OOP.

The only small problem with the book is that categories and protocols were NeXT extensions that weren't supported in the Stepostone compiler, and aren't supported in the POC. Of course, for most people, that isn't a problem, since they're probably using the NeXT Objective-C version that's in gcc.

After programming in Objective-C, and having to switch to using Java, it amazes me that more people don't use it. Java is sooo clumsy and ugly compared to ObjC. At least once a day I find myself wishing for categories or poseAsClass:.

Objective-C takes more from Smalltalk than message-passing, BTW. The original Stepstone libraries and the old NeXT frameworks were heavily influenced by the Smalltalk class libraries. To some extent, NeXT's still is.