In any case, when I see a class described as "abstract" I take that
to mean I should not instantiate the class directly, and I assume
the initializers may return instances of a subclass rather than the
class itself. Is that not correct?
I'm not sure why you would assume such.
There currently is no formalism to create 'real' abstract classes in
Objective-C. So calling a class 'abstract' is just a way of saying
it's *usually* subclassed. Unless the documentation says otherwise,
this does not mean you can't use that class as is.
Similarly class clusters are also not a language feature but just a
Cocoa convention. While class clusters may indeed return different
objects on init, that does not mean that other classes can not do the
same thing. Either way it has to be clearly documented.
NSView is not a class cluster. And instances of NSView are quite
useful on their own (mostly as containers for other views). Whatever
Apple may change in the future, they need to make sure to not hamper
the ability to instantiate NSView or countless applications would break.
Andreas
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