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Re: What does "NS" means ?
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Re: What does "NS" means ?

  • Subject: Re: What does "NS" means ?
  • From: Bill Bumgarner <email@hidden>
  • Date: Sun, 22 May 2005 20:52:44 -0700
On May 22, 2005, at 12:26 PM, John Stiles wrote:
I was under the impression, from talking to other developers, that the "NS" switch occurred before Sun entered the picture (to mean "NeXTStep"). And then when Sun began collaborating with NeXT, the "NeXT-Sun" nomenclature just kind of worked out conveniently. I am not sure if it's true, though.

That pretty much nails it. Sun entered the picture a bit after the NS prefix had come into play.

The NS prefix came about in public APIs during the move from NeXTSTEP 3.0 to NeXTSTEP 4.0 (also known as OpenStep). Prior to 4.0, a handful of symbols used the NX prefix, but most classes provided by the system libraries were not prefixed at all -- List, Hashtable, View, etc...

The NS prefix also happened at the same time that the system provided a String class -- NSString -- was introduced and [almost] all APIs were moved over to using strings objects instead of char*. The move to string classes was strongly motivated by the desire to support many languages out of the box, something that most operating systems did poorly at the time. In other words, NSString was not just to avoid the silliness of char* buffers and the potential crashers therein, but primarily to allow multi-byte characters to be easily handled without requiring much in the way of special cased code in the clients of the APIs.

b.bum
(who chatted w/some folks that did the NS* engineering work in the first place)
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