Re: NSObject Exercise comments?
Re: NSObject Exercise comments?
- Subject: Re: NSObject Exercise comments?
- From: Ondra Cada <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:44:07 +0100
Ahem...
On 12.12.2005, at 20:53, Andy Lee wrote:
Is that so? I thought that was one of the coolest points of Cocoa,
honestly. You certainly still see it throughout Apple's classes.
Is that true?
Yup.
Back in the early NextStep days all methods implicitly returned
self if you didn't return something explicitly, the way Smalltalk
does. (Probably that should be "all methods with id return
values.") I thought that default behavior was removed from
Objective-C as a language feature
Not the slightest bit. See me not-so-old post, which kind of
precisely answered this:
===
I know that there was a convention were the original object was
returned when ever possible, so that one could 'chain' method calls
together. But I think this is discouraged now.
Cocoa uses now a conversion "if there's nothing to return, don't
return anything", the very reason being DO: with distributed objects
which communicate betwixt threads or processes or even computers
through a network, a void return can be *vastly* more efficient than
an ignored object return.
The new convention is thus reasonable in a generic case. Though, for
a concrete class which is never intended to be used with DO nor re-
used heavily, I personally (!) would think that the convenience of
the original NeXTStep convention (i.e., "if there's nothing to
return, return self for easy chaining") should win.
---
Ondra Čada
OCSoftware: email@hidden
http://www.ocs.cz
private email@hidden
http://www.ocs.cz/oc
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