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Objective-C

Objective-C, often referred to as ObjC and more seldom as Objective C or Obj-C, is an object oriented programming language implemented as an extension to C. It is used primarily on Mac OS X and GNUstep, two environments based on the OpenStep standard, and is the primary language used in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. Objective-C can also be written and compiled using systems that gcc runs on, as it includes an Objective-C compiler.

Contents

History

In the 1980s common software engineering practice was based on structured programming. Structured programming was implemented in order to help "break down" programs into smaller parts, primarily to make them easier to work on as they grew increasingly large. However, the power of the computers and the tasks they were being used for quickly overwhelmed the abilities of structured programming to solve them.

Many saw object-oriented programming as a potential solution to the problem. In fact Smalltalk had already addressed many of these engineering issues, and some of the most complex systems in the world were Smalltalk environments. On the downside Smalltalk used a virtual machine to run in, one that was very large and tended to require huge (for the time) amounts of memory, or run very slowly.

OO in general became very much in vogue for a time, perhaps before it was ready. People would oversell the advantages of OO, and attempt projects that were simply not reasonable. Worse, many of the tools were immature or had unrealistic requirements. It wasn't long before a backlash started and people rejected OO as yet another problem.

In the end the engineering community as a whole seemed to adopt a curious attitude. The common consensus was there was no way out of the software engineering problem, because software was fundamentally different than tangible goods, like cars.

ObjC was created primarily by Brad Cox in the early 1980s at his company Stepstone. He had become interested in the problems of true reusability in software design and programming. In order to demonstrate that real progress could be made, Cox set about to show that making interchangeable software components really needed only a few practical changes to existing tools. Specifically they needed to support objects in a flexible manner, come supplied with a set of libraries that were actually usable, and allow for the code (and any resources needed by the code) to be bundled into a single cross-platform format.

The main description of Objective-C in its original form was published in his book, Object-oriented Programming, An Evolutionary Approach in 1986. Cox was careful to point out that there is more to the problem than the language, but it appears this fell on deaf ears. Instead, the system found itself compared on a feature-for-feature basis with other languages, missing the forest for the trees.

Language basics

Objective-C is a very "thin" layer on top of C. In fact it includes only one syntax change and about a dozen new key words. Objective-C is a strict superset of C. That is, you can compile any C program with an Objective-C compiler and obtain a meaningful executable, which can't be said of C++.

Messages

The syntax change is for sending messages (basically, method calls) to objects, and is based on the programming model of Smalltalk, in contrast to the programming model of Simula used by C++.

An object called obj which has a method doSomething implemented is said to respond to doSomething. If we wish to send a doSomething message to obj, we write

 [obj doSomething];

What is markedly different from such strongly typed languages such as C++ and Java is that the programmer can send messages to objects that do not respond to them. See the dynamic typing section below.

Interfaces and implementations

Objective-C requires the interface and implementation of a class to be in separate specially declared code blocks. By convention, the interface is put in a header file and the implementation in a code file.

Interface

The interface to the object is usually defined in a header file. Convention is usually to create the name of the header file, based on the name of the object. So if we have the object Thing, Thing's interface goes in the file Thing.h.

The interface declaration is in the form

 @interface classname : class to inherit from
 {
    instance variables
 }
 + class method
 + class method
  ...
 - instance method
 - instance method
  ...
 @end

Implementation

The interface only declares the prototypes for the methods, and not the methods themselves, which go in the implementation. The implementation is usually stored in, for example, Thing.m. The implementation is written

 @implementation classname
 + class method
 {
    implementation
 }
 
 - instance method
 {
    implementation
 }
  ...
 @end

Methods are written in a different way than in C. For example, in C, we write

 int do_something(int i)
 {
    return square_root(i);
 }

with int do_something(int) as the prototype.

In Objective-C however, this becomes, in the implementation

 - (int) do_something: (int) i
 {
    return [self square_root: i];
 }

The hyphen lets us know that this is an instance method, and not a class method (which uses a +). This syntax may appear to be more troublesome but it allows the naming of parameters, for example

 - (int)changeColorWithRed:(int) r green: (int) g blue: (int) b
 ...

which would be invoked thus:

 [myColor changeColorWithRed:5 green:5 blue:5];

If myColor was of the class Color, internally, instance method changeColorWithRed would be _i_Color_changeColorWithRed_green_blue. The i is to refer to an instance method, then the class and then method names with colons translated to underscores.

Protocols

Objective-C was extended at NeXT to introduce the concept of multiple inheritance of specification, but not implementation, through the introduction of protocols. This is a pattern achievable as an abstract multiply inherited base class in C++ or, more popularly adopted in Java as an "interface". The syntax

 @protocol Locking
 - (void)lock;
 - (void)unlock;
 @end

denotes that there is the abstract idea of locking that is useful and when stated in a class definition

 @interface SomeClass : SomeSuperClass <Locking>
 ...
 @end

that instances of SomeClass will provide an implementation for the two instance methods using whatever means they want. This abstract specification is particularly useful to describe, for example, the desired behaviors of plug-ins for example, without constraining at all what the implementation hierarchy should be.

Dynamic typing

Objective-C is a dynamically typed language, as is Smalltalk. This means that we can send a message to an object which is not specified in its interface. This may seem like a bad idea, but in fact this allows for a great level of flexibility - in Objective-C an object can "capture" this message, and depending on the object, can send the message off again to a different object (who can respond to the message correctly and appropriately, or likewise send the message on again). This behaviour is known as message forwarding or delegation. Alternatively, an error handler can be used instead, in case the message can not be forwarded. However if the object does not forward the message, handle the error, or respond to it, a runtime error occurs.

As with other dynamically typed languages, there is the potential problem of an endless stream of run-time errors that come from sending the wrong message to the wrong object. However Objective-C allows the programmer to optionally identify the class of an object, and in those cases the compiler will apply strong-typing methodology. In fact most programs use this extensively in order to avoid these problems.

In an Objective-C function declaration, a special type, id, casts a parameter as a pointer to an object, without requiring that object to be of any class:

 -(void)setMyValue:(id)aStringOrANumber;

If the programmer wants to require that the parameter is an object of a specific class, he can specify the type in the same way:

 -(void)setMyValueToANumber:(NSNumber *)aNumber;

Perhaps most usefully, the programmer can allow the parameter to be dynamically-typed, but require that the parameter conform to a given protocol:

 -(void)setMyValue:(id <ValueGivingProtocol>)anyObjectThatConforms;


When one does need dynamic typing, it becomes tremendously powerful. Consider a simple example, placing an object in a container. In strongly-typed languages like C++ and Java, the programmer is forced to write a container class for a generic type of object, and then cast back and forth between the abstract generic type and the real type (C++ can also use templates, but many find these somewhat cumbersome and obscure). Sadly, casting breaks the discipline of strong typing -- if you put in an Integer and read out a String, you get an error. This is annoying when you consider that it was a string when you put it in there three lines earlier, and now you have to tell the compiler that it is a string coming back out just to call toUpperCase(). Dynamic typing removes this problem.

Categories

Cox's main concern was the maintainability of large code bases. Experience from the structured programming world had shown that one of the main ways to improve code was to break it down into smaller pieces. Objective-C added the concept of Categories to help with this process.

A category collects method implementations into separate files. The programmer can place groups of related methods into a category to make them more readable. For instance, one could create a "SpellChecking" category "on" the String object, collecting all of the methods related to spell checking into a single place.

Furthermore, the methods within a category are added to a class at runtime. Thus, categories permit the programmer to add methods to an existing class without the need to recompile that class or even have access to its source code. For example, if the system you are supplied with does not contain a spell checker in its String implementation, you can add it without modifying the String source code.

Methods within categories become indistinguishable from the methods in a class when the program is run. A category has full access to all of the instance variables within the class, including private variables.

Categories provide an elegant solution to the fragile base class problem for methods.

If you declare a method in a category with the same method signature as an existing method in a class, the category's method is adopted. Thus categories can not only add methods to a class, but also replace existing methods. This feature can be used to fix bugs in other classes by rewriting their methods, or to cause a global change to a class's behavior within a program. If two categories have methods with the same method signature, it is undefined which category's method is adopted.

Other languages have attempted to add this feature in a variety of ways. TOM took the Objective-C system to its logical conclusion and allowed for the addition of variables as well. Other languages have instead used prototype oriented solutions, the most notable being Self.

Posing

Objective-C permits a class to wholly replace another class within a program. The replacing class is said to "pose as" the target class. All messages sent to the target class are then instead received by the posing class. There are several restrictions on which classes can pose:

  • A class may only pose as one of its direct or indirect superclasses
  • The posing class must not define any new instance variables that are absent from the target class (though it may define or override methods).
  • No messages must have been sent to the target class prior to the posing.

Posing, similarly to categories, allows globally augmenting existing classes. Posing permits two features absent from categories:

  • A posing class can call overridden methods through super, thus incorporating the implementation of the target class.
  • A posing class can override methods defined in categories.

Other features

Objective-C in fact included a laundry-list of features that are still being added to other languages, or simply don't exist at all. These led from Cox's (and later, NeXT's) realization that there is considerably more to programming than the language. The system has to be usable and flexible as a whole in order to work in a real-world setting.

  • Delegating methods to other objects at run-time is trivial. Simply add a category that changes the "second chance" method to forward the invocation to the delegate.
  • Remote invocation is trivial. Simply add a category that changes the "second chance" method to serialize the invocation and forward it off.
  • Swizzling allows for classes to change at runtime. Typically used for debugging where freed objects are swizzled into Zombies, whose only purpose is to report an error when someone calls them. Swizzling was also used in EOF to create database faults. Swizzling is used today by Apple's Foundation Framework to implement Key-Value Observing.
  • Archiving. An object can be archived into a stream, such as a file, and can be read and restored on demand.

Objective-C++

Objective-C++ is a front-end to the Mac OS X version of the GNU Compiler Collection that can compile source files that use both C++ and Objective-C, with certain restrictions:

  • A C++ class cannot derive from an Objective-C class and vice versa.
  • C++ namespaces cannot be declared inside an Objective-C declaration.
  • Objective-C classes cannot have instance variables of a C++ class type that has virtual functions, nor can C++ classes have instances of Objective-C objects.
  • An Objective-C declaration cannot be within a C++ template declaration and vice versa, though Objective-C classes can be used as C++ template parameters.

Today

Objective-C today is often used in tandem with a fixed library of standard objects (often known as a "kit" or "framework"), such as OpenStep/Cocoa/GNUstep. These libraries often come with the operating system - the OPENSTEP libraries come with the OPENSTEP operating system and Cocoa comes with Mac OS X. One can however bypass the framework and inherit directly from the root object, Object, and create one's own functionality. The aforementioned libraries however implement NSObject, a more technologically advanced version of Object.

History note: Earlier versions of NeXT's NeXTSTEP operating system had objects inheriting from Object, but migrated to the newer NSObject root object, which was named to distinguish it from the original Object root (see Disadvantages below). All newer versions of the NeXTSTEP libraries which had objects inheriting from NSObject were prefixed with "NS", whilst those which did not inherit from NSObject did not. Later, the entire library codebase as OpenStep moved to use the NSObject class outright, and to maintain compatibility with the NeXTSTEP libraries, the prefix was maintained, and is still maintained in Cocoa today. On the other hand, Cocoa has a class which does not inherit from NSObject: NSProxy.

Analysis of the language

Objective-C is a very "practical" language. It uses a thin runtime written in C that adds little to the size of the application. In contrast most OO systems of the era used large VM runtimes that took over the entire system. Programs written in ObjC tended to be not much larger than the size of their code and that of the libraries (which often didn't have to be included in the software distribution ), in contrast to Smalltalk systems where you needed huge amounts of memory just to open a window.

Likewise the language was implemented on top of existing C compilers (first as a pre-processor, later as a GCC module) rather than as a new compiler. This allowed ObjC to leverage the huge existing collection of C code, libraries, tools, and mindshare. You can easily wrap existing C libraries - even in object code libraries - in ObjC wrappers to give them an OO style and more easily use them in your programs.

All of these practical changes lowered the barrier to entry , likely the biggest problem for the widespread acceptance of Smalltalk in the 1980s. In general Objective-C can be summed up as offering much of the flexibility of the later Smalltalk systems, in a language that is deployed as easily as C.

The first versions of Objective-C did not support garbage collection. At the time this was a matter of some debate and many people considered the long "dead times" when Smalltalk did collection to render the entire system unusable. Objective-C avoided that problem by not including this feature. Although some 3rd party implementations have added this feature (most notably GNUstep), Apple has not implemented it as of Mac OS X 10.3.

Another problem is that Objective-C does not include a namespace mechanism. Instead programmers are forced to add prefixes to their class names, which often runs into collisions. As of 2004, all Mac OS X classes and functions in the Cocoa programming environment are prefixed with "NS" (as in NSObject or NSButton) to clearly identify them as belonging to the Mac OS X core; the "NS" derives from the names of the classes as defined during the development of NEXTSTEP.

Since Objective-C is a strict superset of C, it does not treat C primitive types as first-class objects either.

Objective-C does not support operator overloading (though it does support ad-hoc polymorphism), unlike the C++ language. Also, unlike C++, Objective-C allows an object only to directly inherit from one class (forbidding multiple inheritance). Since Java was influenced by Objective-C, this is also the case in Java. Categories and protocols may be used to provide many of the benefits of multiple inheritance, without many of the disadvantages, such as extra runtime overhead and binary incompatibilities.

External links

  • The Objective-C Programming Language (pdf) http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/ObjC.pdf
  • Steve Dekorte Objective-C page http://www.dekorte.com/Objective-C/
  • The Objective-C++ Front End http://developer.apple.com/documentation/ReleaseNotes/Cocoa/Objective-C++.html
  • Beginner's Guide to Objective-C http://www.otierney.net/objective-c.html
  • ObjectiveLib -variant of a Standard Template Library http://objectivelib.sourceforge.net/


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Last updated: 02-08-2005 09:42:39
Last updated: 05-03-2005 17:50:55