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Objective-C literals for NSDictionary, NSArray, and NSNumber

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Re: Objective-C literals for NSDictionary, NSArray, and NSNumber

#3

Post by terhechte »

This is fantastic. Previously I was employing a macro library that offered $dict(k, v, k, v) and $arr(1, 2, 3) and $bool. But the @[] feels much better, and it increases code portability if a class is not dependent upon a separate macro library. It will really remove the verbosity of objc which is oftentimes one of the major criticisms.

Re: Objective-C literals for NSDictionary, NSArray, and NSNumber

#4

Post by demallien »

ugh. As much as I love the changes that Apple have been making to Objective-C, as someone with a rather large - first-time project undrway, the pace of change is just killing me. In the last three years we have seen blocks (and Grand Central Dispatch) and garbag collection, Automatic Reference Counting, and now this.

These are all good changes (well, except for garbage collection, but hey, they kicked that out with ARC anyway), but it really is hard to stay up-to-date. Yeah, I know, woe is me, my tools supplier is constantly supplying better free tools, but it is daunting having to review each of this evolutions, and determine if it is worth the effort to integrate it into my project.

Re: Objective-C literals for NSDictionary, NSArray, and NSNumber

#6

Post by program »

frou_dh wrote: post #5

Does this come courtesy of a new version of the Objective-C language? The definition of ObjC confuses me a bit. It's said to be a superset of C - but which C? C89? C99? GNU-C-Something?

Objective-C is a proper superset of C89, C99 and K&R C. You can specify it at compile time --std.

Re: Objective-C literals for NSDictionary, NSArray, and NSNumber

#7

Post by rsynnott »

demallien wrote: post #4

ugh. As much as I love the changes that Apple have been making to Objective-C, as someone with a rather large - first-time project undrway, the pace of change is just killing me. In the last three years we have seen blocks (and Grand Central Dispatch) and garbag collection, Automatic Reference Counting, and now this. These are all good changes (well, except for garbage collection, but hey, they kicked that out with A…

> but it really is hard to stay up-to-date.

Well, you don't really _need_ to; this one is just syntactic sugar, and the others, while nice (or mostly; I'm unconvinced about ARC), are not necessary. I'd prefer to have the options.

Re: Objective-C literals for NSDictionary, NSArray, and NSNumber

#8

Post by flyosity »

demallien wrote: post #4

ugh. As much as I love the changes that Apple have been making to Objective-C, as someone with a rather large - first-time project undrway, the pace of change is just killing me. In the last three years we have seen blocks (and Grand Central Dispatch) and garbag collection, Automatic Reference Counting, and now this. These are all good changes (well, except for garbage collection, but hey, they kicked that out with A…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but how much effort are you talking about here? Skipping @synthesize on properties or using literal syntax where/when it makes sense wouldn't cause much additional cognitive load and you don't have to convert old code to use the new sugar.
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