Objective C


Objective C

(language)An object-oriented superset of ANSI C by BradCox, Productivity Products. Its additions to C are few andare mostly based on Smalltalk. Objective C is implementedas a preprocessor for C. Its syntax is a superset ofstandard C syntax, and its compiler accepts both C andObjective C source code (filename extension ".m").

It has no operator overloading, multiple inheritance, orclass variables. It does have dynamic binding. It isused as the system programming language on the NeXT. Asimplemented for NEXTSTEP, the Objective C language is fullycompatible with ANSI C.

Objective C can also be used as an extension to C++, whichlacks some of the possibilities for object-oriented designthat dynamic typing and dynamic binding bring to ObjectiveC. C++ also has features not found in Objective C.

Versions exist for MS-DOS, Macintosh, VAX/VMS andUnix workstations. Language versions by Stepstone,NeXT and GNU are slightly different.

There is a library of (GNU) Objective C objects byR. Andrew McCallum with similarfunctionality to Smalltalk's Collection objects. Itincludes: Set, Bag, Array, LinkedList, LinkList,CircularArray, Queue, Stack, Heap, SortedArray,MappedCollector, GapArray and DelegateList. Version: AlphaRelease. ftp://iesd.auc.dk/pub/ObjC/.

See also: Objectionable-C.

["Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach", BradCox, A-W 1986].