Re: Parameter lists
Re: Parameter lists
- Subject: Re: Parameter lists
- From: Ben Dougall <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 8 Nov 2003 02:07:29 +0000
On Saturday, November 8, 2003, at 01:02 am, John MacMullin wrote:
Then why is it referenced in the Objective-C Pocket Reference by
Duncan? (At page 18).
John
it depends if the method was written in the first place to take
variable parameters or not. some are, some aren't and it's completely
up to you with your methods that you write, but not with pre-written
methods. put it this way: can you call the strcmp() c function with a
comma separated variable parameters list? no, because it was not
defined / declared so - with the ... as the last parameter that is. can
you call printf with a variable parameter list? yes, because it was
written that way. same goes for objective-c. the method has to be
written defining that it takes a variable parameter list to allow it to
take a variable list. you can't just decide to call a method or
function that was not defined to take a variable parameter list with a
call containing comma seperated parameters.
On Friday, November 7, 2003, at 03:55 PM, Alastair Houghton wrote:
On 7 Nov 2003, at 22:47, John MacMullin wrote:
With that reflection let us turn to the merits of my comment, which
again, was not intended to insult Apple or anyone else.
I don't think anyone assumed that it was. We're just a bit surprised
at what you wrote.
My original code came from the Objective C Pocket Reference by
Duncan and and the C Programming Language by K and R. Placing
multiple parameters in a function (or method) separated by commas is
the ordinary c approach. Others on the cocoa list, and in the
Apple doc, had stated that support for the ordinary c language is
part of Cocoa.
I think you've got the wrong end of the stick.
Support for the ordinary C language is part of Objective-C. Cocoa is
just a set of frameworks you can use with Objective-C. Methods,
since they are not a part of the C language, use Objective-C syntax,
which uses colons rather than commas, primarily because it supports
named arguments (a single colon with no name is just an argument with
a blank name).
Some methods do, in fact, use commas, but only if they take a
variable number of arguments (e.g. NSString's +stringWithFormat:
method); this does seem somewhat inconsistent, and is probably an
artefact of the original implementation of Objective-C.
Accordingly, it just seems to me that this approach should be
supported in Cocoa.
It is, for C functions. But Objective-C isn't part of C (rather, the
other way around).
Kind regards,
Alastair.
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