Introduction to The Objective-C Programming Language 1.0

An object-oriented approach to application development makes programs more intuitive to design, faster to develop, more amenable to modification, and easier to understand. Most object-oriented development environments consist of at least three parts:

• An object-oriented programming language and support library

• A library of objects

• A set of development tools

This document is about the first component of the development environment—the programming language and its runtime environment. It fully describes the Objective-C language, and provides a foundation for learning about the second component, the Mac OS X Objective-C application frameworks—collectively known as Cocoa. You can start to learn more about Cocoa by reading Getting Started with Cocoa. The two main development tools you use are Xcode and Interface Builder, described in Xcode 2.0 User Guide and Interface Builder respectively.

The Objective-C language is a simple computer language designed to enable sophisticated object-oriented programming. Objective-C is defined as small but powerful set of extensions to the standard ANSI C language. Its additions to C are mostly based on Smalltalk, one of the first object-oriented programming languages. Objective-C is designed to give C full object-oriented programming capabilities, and to do so in a simple and straightforward way.

For those who have never used object-oriented programming to create applications before, this document is also designed to help you become familiar with object-oriented development. It spells out some of the implications of object-oriented design and gives you a flavor of what writing an object-oriented program is really like.

Who Should Read This Document

The document is intended for readers who might be interested in:

• Learning about object-oriented programming

• Finding out about the basis for the Cocoa application framework

• Programming in Objective-C

This document both introduces the object-oriented model that Objective-C is based upon and fully documents the language. It concentrates on the Objective-C extensions to C, not on the C language itself.

Because this isn’t a document about C, it assumes some prior acquaintance with that language. However, it doesn’t have to be an extensive acquaintance. Object-oriented programming in Objective-C is sufficiently different from procedural programming in ANSI C that you won’t be hampered if you’re not an experienced C programmer.

Organization of This Document

This document is divided into four chapters and two appendixes. The chapters are:

• The Language describes the basic concepts and syntax of Objective-C. It covers many of the same topics as Object-Oriented Programming, but looks at them from the standpoint of the Objective-C language. It reintroduces the terminology of object-oriented programming, but in the context of Objective-C.

• The Runtime System looks at the NSObject class and how Objective-C programs interact with the runtime system. In particular, it examines the paradigms for managing object allocations, dynamically loading new classes at runtime, and forwarding messages to other objects.

The appendixes contain reference material that might be useful for understanding the language. They are:

• Language Summary lists and briefly comments on all of the Objective-C extensions to the C language.

• Grammar presents, without comment, a formal grammar of the Objective-C extensions to the C language. This reference manual is meant to be read as a companion to the reference manual for C presented in The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, published by Prentice Hall.

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