Re: Beginner's questions
Re: Beginner's questions
- Subject: Re: Beginner's questions
- From: Angela Brett <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 11:04:38 +1300
As for the syntax, I can't understand what drives you to using those
terrible and unintelligible things like foo.bar(1,2,3,"x",7) instead of
extremely legible [foo barWithNumber:1 count:2 size:3 name:@"x" value:7] or
so.
Well, I like the legibility too, but if there's one good thing about
C++ (if you like C) it's that it is such a natural extension of C
syntax - even the name is! The classes are like structs, the methods
are like functions, [] is for arrays. Objective-C has all these new
things like [object message] and @interface and -
funnyLookingMessageImplementationsWith:(Different
*)wayOfExpressingArguments. Objective-C also means more typing, since
we have to type the names of the arguments, and they can be quite
long. I thought at first that would bother me, but I don't mind all
the typing since it makes it more legible and also easier to remember
what I'm doing while I'm typing it - if I have to look up how to make
one of the arguments, I don't then forget where it's supposed to go.
Of course, now I've got the hang of that new stuff, I really like
Objective-C, even though I haven't really used its more powerful
features yet. Perhaps I only like Objective-C more because I can
actually do things with it (I've never written any GUI software in
plain C or C++) but nevertheless I'm not saying that C++ is better,
I'm just pointing out that the syntax is a more obvious extension of
C syntax, and that's probably what drives people to use it. Woah,
what a long sentence.
Oh, and while I'm here, I might as well jump on the bandwagon and say
that the [ and ] keys are right next to the P on my keyboard... maybe
they're elsewhere in non-English-speaking countries or something.
--
Angela Brett email@hidden
http://acronyms.co.nz/angela
A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems -- Paul Erdos