Re: Objective-C literal constants (was: ObjC and the dual runtime issue(s))

Subject: Re: Objective-C literal constants (was: ObjC and the dual runtime issue(s))
From: Helge Hess <email@hidden>
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 15:53:32 +0100

On 31.12.2003, at 09:35, Oleg Svirgstin wrote:

Subscription operator (objectAtIndex:zzz or objectForKey:zzz

Another CRAZY idea would be to provide a way to address items of NSArray,
NSDictionary and probably NSSet by a syntactic shortcut (subscription
operator). I don't know exactly, it seems that meaning of [] in this case is
quite distinct:

Well, this isn't too crazy, IMHO. Indeed Python works this way and I personally like it a lot. Enumerators are also in that category (for access like "for i in obj").

But I guess one should first think about how much one would like to modify the basic C constructs. If I'm not mistaken any current Objective-C construct doesn't overload a C expression in some way but rather uses something completely new/different.

To use "[]" for index based access you would need to attach special meaning to "id" and any other Objective-C type. Currently those are just plain and regular C structures.
Maybe someone has a better suggestion for an operator to be used for that? Like:
array@10 = @"hello world";
?

This more or less is in the same category like Marcel's suggestion for SmallIntegers. Nice addition but quite a major change in the C semantics.
The more I think about all this the more I get the impression that for most of the mentioned features one probably should not tweak the Objective-C language but rather use something completely new with a similiar syntax, working on the same runtime but without the need to stay C compatible. Like FScript or WebScript. Don't know.

Greets
Helge
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	>Re: Objective-C literal constants (was: ObjC and the dual runtime issue(s)) (From: Oleg Svirgstin <email@hidden>)

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