For the mechanism of "pass by value", it was so that the callee cannot alter the original data. So the callee can change the parameter variable in any way, but when the function returns, the original value in the argument variable is not changed.
But in Objective-C or Ruby, since all variables for objects are references to objects, when we pass the object to any method, the method can "send a message" to alter the object. After the method returns, the caller will continue with the argument already in a different state.
Or is there a way to guarantee the passed in object not changed (its states not altered) -- is there such a mechanism?
You're somewhat misusing the term "pass by value" and "pass by reference" here. What you really are discussing is const. In C++, you can refer to a const instance of a mutable class. There is no similar concept for ObjC objects (or in Ruby I believe, though I am much less familiar with Ruby than ObjC). ObjC does, via C, have the concept of const pointers, but these are a much weaker promise.
The best solution to this in ObjC is to prefer value (immutable) classes whenever possible. See Imutability in Objective-c for more discussion on that.
The next-best solution is to, as a matter of design, avoid this situation. Avoid side effects in your methods that are not obvious from the name. By avoiding this as a matter of design, callers should not need to worry about it. Remember, the caller and the called are on the same team. Neither should be trying to protected itself from the other. Good naming and good API design help the developer avoid error without compiler enforcement. ObjC has little compiler enforcement, so good naming and good API design are absolutely critical. I would say the same for Ruby, despite my limited experience there, in that it is also a highly dynamic language.
Finally, if you are dealing with a poorly behaved API that does modify your object when it shouldn't, you can resort to passing it a copy.
But if you're designing this from scratch, think hard about using an immutable class whenever possible.
I'm not sure what you are getting at. Ruby is pass-by-value. You cannot "change the argument variable":
def is_ruby_pass_by_value?(foo)
foo = 'No, Ruby is not pass-by-value.'
return nil
end
bar = 'Yes, of course, Ruby *is* pass-by-value!'
is_ruby_pass_by_value?(bar)
p bar
# 'Yes, of course, Ruby *is* pass-by-value!'
I'm not sure about Objective-C, but I would be surprised if it were different.
I've read that sending messages to nil is allowed in ObjC and I understand that this is a part of the language and that there has been controversy about it, pro and con. I don't want to open up a discussion about any of that.
I just want to know if there is a way, short of always having to test if (presumedInstance != nil), that I can get errors when trying to send a message to nil? It is not helping me when coding that I don't get errors - makes it harder to determine where the code flaw is, etc.
Perhaps a setting or script in XCode?
No, there's no way to do this. In fact, it's a very important feature of Objective-C. I'd actually argue it's more important for you to do the testing (if (object), which is the same as if (object != nil)) because it forces you to consider the inputs and outputs of your functions and methods, and the code paths your application goes through. It might be frustrating at first, but it's one of the things you get used to, and it makes life much easier.
What about trying assertions, like with NSAssert?
NSAssert Generates an assertion if a given condition is false.
Usage : NSAssert(condition, desc)
Parameters :
condition : An expression that evaluates to YES or NO.
desc : An NSString object that contains an error message describing the failure condition.
Reference :
What's the point of NSAssert, actually?
Apple Developer Documentation
I have recently read Apple's sample code for MVCNetworking written by Apple's Developer Technical Support guru Quinn "The Eskimo!". The sample is really nice learning experience with what I guess are best development practices for iOS development.
What surprised me, coming from JVM languages, are extremely frequent assertions like this:
syncDate = [NSDate date];
assert(syncDate != nil);
and this:
photosToRemove = [NSMutableSet setWithArray:knownPhotos];
assert(photosToRemove != nil);
and this:
photoIDToKnownPhotos = [NSMutableDictionary dictionary];
assert(photoIDToKnownPhotos != nil);
Is that really necessary? Is that coding style worth emulating?
If you're used to Java, this may seem strange. You'd expect an object creation message to throw an exception when it fails, rather than return nil. However, while Objective-C on Mac OS X has support for exception handling; it's an optional feature that can be turned on/off with a compiler flag. The standard libraries are written so they can be used without exception handling turned on: hence messages often return nil to indicate errors, and sometimes require you to also pass a pointer to an NSError* variable. (This is for Mac development, I'm not sure whether you can even turn exception handling support on for iOS, considering you also can't turn on garbage collection for iOS.)
The section "Handling Initialization Failure" in the document "The Objective-C Programming Language" explains how Objective-C programmers are expected to deal with errors in object initialization/creation: that is, return nil.
Something like [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile: path] may definitely return nil: the documentation for the method explicitly says so. But I'm honestly not sure whether something like [NSMutableArray arrayWithCapacity: n] ever returns nil. The only situation I can think of when it might is when the application is out of memory. But in that case I'd expect the application to be aborted by the attempt to allocate more memory. I have not checked this though, and it may very well be that it returns nil in this case. While in Objective-C you can often safely send messages to nil, this could then still lead to undesirable results. For example, your application may try to make an NSMutableArray, get nil instead, and then happily continue sending addObject: to nil and write out an empty file to disk rather than one with elements of the array as intended. So in some cases it's better to check explicitly whether the result of a message was nil. Whether doing it at every object creation is necessary, like the programmer you're quoting is doing, I'm not sure. Better safe than sorry perhaps?
Edit: I'd like to add that while checking that object creation succeeded can sometimes be a good idea, asserting it may not be the best idea. You'd want this to be also checked in the release version of your application, not just in the debug version. Otherwise it kind of defeats the point of checking it, since you don't want the application end user to, for example, wind up with empty files because [NSMutableArray arrayWithCapacity: n] returned nil and the application continued sending messages to the nil return value. Assertions (with assert or NSAssert) can be removed from the release version with compiler flags; Xcode doesn't seem to include these flags by default in the "Release" configuration though. But if you'd want to use these flags to remove some other assertions, you'd also be removing all your "object creation succeeded" checks.
Edit: Upon further reflection, it seems more plausible than I first thought that [NSMutableArray arrayWithCapacity: n] would return nil rather than abort the application when not enough memory is available. Basic C malloc also doesn't abort but returns a NULL pointer when not enough memory is available. But I haven't yet found any clear mention of this in the Objective-C documentation on alloc and similar methods.
Edit: Above I said I wasn't sure checking for nil is necessary at every object creation. But it shouldn't be. This is exactly why Objective-C allows sending messages to nil, which then return nil (or 0 or something similar, depending on the message definition): this way, nil can propagate through your code somewhat similar to an exception so that you don't have to explicitly check for nil at every single message that might return it. But it's a good idea to check for it at points where you don't want it to propagate, like when writing files, interacting with the user and so on, or in cases where the result of sending a message to nil is undefined (as explained in the documentation on sending messages to nil). I'd be inclined to say this is like the "poor man's" version of exception propagation&handling, though not everyone may agree that the latter is better; but nil doesn't tell you anything about why an error occurred and you can easily forget to check for it where such checks are necessary.
Yup. I think it's a good idea.. It helps to filter out the edge cases (out of memory, input variables empty/nil) as soon as the variables are introduced. Although I am not sure the impact on speed because of the overhead!
I guess it's a matter of personal choice. Usually asserts are used for debugging purpose so that the app crashes at the assert points if the conditions are not met. You'd normally like to strip them out on your app releases though.
I personally am too lazy to place asserts around every block of code as you have shown. I think it's close to being a bit too paranoid. Asserts might be pretty handy in case of conditions where some uncertainity is involved.
I have also asked this on Apple DevForums. According to Quinn "The Eskimo!" (author of the MVCNetworking sample in question) it is a matter of coding style and his personal preference:
I use lots of asserts because I hate debugging. (...)
Keep in mind that I grew up with traditional Mac OS, where a single rogue pointer could bring down your entire machine (similarly to kernel programming on current systems). In that world it was important to find your bugs sooner rather than later. And lots of asserts help you do that.
Also, even today I spend much of my life dealing with network programs. Debugging network programs is hard because of the asynchrony involved. Asserts help to with this, because they are continually checking the state of your program as it runs.
However, I think you have a valid point with stuff like +[NSDate date]. The chances of that returning nil are low. The assert is there purely from habit. But I think the costs of this habit (some extra typing, learning to ignore the asserts) are small compared to the benefits.
From this I gather that asserting that every object creation succeeded is not strictly necessary.
Asserts can be valuable to document the pre-conditions in methods, during development, as design aid for other maintainers (including the future self). I personally prefer the alternative style - to separate the specification and implementation using TDD/BDD practices.
Asserts can be used to double-check runtime types of method arguments due to the dynamic nature of Objective C:
assert([response isKindOfClass:[NSHTTPURLResponse class]]);
I'm sure there are more good uses of assertions. All Things In Moderation...
In Objective-C, you can't declare method names where the last component doesn't take an argument. For example, the following is illegal.
-(void)take:(id)theMoney andRun;
-(void)take:(id)yourMedicine andDontComplain;
Why was Objective-C designed this way? Was it just an artifact of Smalltalk that no one saw a need to be rid of?
This limitation makes sense in Smalltalk, since Smalltalk doesn't have delimiters around message invocation, so the final component would be interpreted as a unary message to the last argument. For example, BillyAndBobby take:'$100' andRun would be parsed as BillyAndBobby take:('$100' andRun). This doesn't matter in Objective-C where square brackets are required.
Supporting parameterless selector components wouldn't gain us much in all the usual ways a language is measured, as the method name a programmer picks (e.g. runWith: rather than take:andRun) doesn't affect the functional semantics of a program, nor the expressiveness of the language. Indeed, a program with parameterless components is alpha equivalent to one without. I'm thus not interested in answers that state such a feature isn't necessary (unless that was the stated reasons of the Objective-C designers; does anyone happen to know Brad Cox or Tom Love? Are they here?) or that say how to write method names so the feature isn't needed. The primary benefit is readability and writability (which is like readability, only... you know), as it would mean you could write method names that even more closely resemble natural language sentences. The likes of -(BOOL)applicationShouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed:(NSApplication*)theApplication (which Matt Gallagher points out on "Cocoa With Love" is a little bit confusing when you drop the formal parameter) could be named -(BOOL)application:(NSApplication*)theApplication shouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed, thus placing the parameter immediately next to the appropriate noun.
Apple's Objective-C runtime (for example) is perfectly capable of handling these kind of selectors, so why not the compiler? Why not support them in method names as well?
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#import <objc/runtime.h>
#interface Potrzebie : NSObject
-(void)take:(id)thing;
#end
#implementation Potrzebie
+(void)initialize {
SEL take_andRun = NSSelectorFromString(#"take:andRun");
IMP take_ = class_getMethodImplementation(self, #selector(take:));
if (take_) {
if (NO == class_addMethod(self, take_andRun, take_, "##:#")) {
NSLog(#"Couldn't add selector '%#' to class %s.",
NSStringFromSelector(take_andRun),
class_getName(self));
}
} else {
NSLog(#"Couldn't find method 'take:'.");
}
}
-(void)take:(id)thing {
NSLog(#"-take: (actually %#) %#",NSStringFromSelector(_cmd), thing);
}
#end
int main() {
NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
Potrzebie *axolotl=[[Potrzebie alloc] init];
[axolotl take:#"paradichloroaminobenzaldehyde"];
[axolotl performSelector:NSSelectorFromString(#"take:andRun")
withObject:#"$100"];
[axolotl release];
[pool release];
return 0;
}
This is Brad Cox. My original answer misunderstood the question. I assumed reallyFast was a hardcoded extension to trigger faster messaging, not a kind of syntactic sugar. The real answer is that Smalltalk didn't support it, perhaps because its parser couldn't deal with the (assumed) ambiguity. Although OC's square brackets would remove any ambiguity, I simply didn't think of departing from Smalltalk's keyword structure.
21 years of programming Objective-C and this question has never crossed my mind. Given the language design, the compiler is right and the runtime functions are wrong ().
The notion of interleaved arguments with method names has always meant that, if there is at least one argument, the last argument is always the last part of the method invocation syntax.
Without thinking it through terribly much, I'd bet there are some syntactic bugaboos with not enforcing the current pattern. At the least, it would make the compiler harder to write in that any syntax which has optional elements interleaved with expressions is always harder to parse. There might even be an edge case that flat out prevents it. Certainly, Obj-C++ would make it more challenging, but that wasn't integrated with the language until years after the base syntax was already set in stone.
As far as why Objective-C was designed this way, I'd suspect the answer is that the original designers of the language just didn't consider allowing the interleaved syntax to go beyond that last argument.
That is a best guess. I'll ask one of 'em and update my answer when I find out more.
I asked Brad Cox about this and he was very generous in responding in detail (Thanks, Brad!!):
I was focused at that time on
duplicating as much of Smalltalk as
possible in C and doing that as
efficiently as possible. Any spare
cycles went into making ordinary
messaging fast. There was no thought
of a specialized messaging option
("reallyFast?" [bbum: I asked using 'doSomething:withSomething:reallyFast'
as the example]) since ordinary
messages were already as fast as they
could be. This involved hand-tuning
the assembler output of the C
proto-messager, which was such a
portability nightmare that some if not
all of that was later taken out. I do
recall the hand-hacked messager was
very fast; about the cost of two
function calls; one to get into the
messager logic and the rest for doing
method lookups once there.
Static typing enhancements were later
added on top of Smalltalk's pure
dynamic typing by Steve Naroff and
others. I had only limited involvement
in that.
Go read Brad's answer!
Just for your information, the runtime doesn't actually care about the selectors, any C string is valid, you could as well make a selector like that: "==+===+---__--¨¨¨¨¨^::::::" with no argument the runtime will accept it, the compiler just can't or else it's impossible to parse. There are absolutely no sanity check when it comes to selectors.
I assume they are not supported in Objective-C because they weren't available in Smalltalk, either. But that has a different reason than you think: they are not needed. What is needed is support for methods with 0, 1, 2, 3, ... arguments. For every number of arguments, there is already a working syntax to call them. Adding any other syntax would just cause unnecessary confusion.
If you wanted multi-word parameterless selectors, why stop with a single extra word? One might then ask that
[axolotl perform selector: Y with object: Y]
also becomes supported (i.e. that a selector is a sequence of words, some with colon and a parameter, and others not). While this would have been possible, I assume that nobody considered it worthwhile.
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We now have the "dot" notation for properties. I've seen various back and forths about the merits of dot notation vs. message notation. To keep the responses untainted I'm not going to respond either way in the question.
What is your thought about dot notation vs. message notation for property accessing?
Please try to keep it focused on Objective-C - my one bias I'll put forth is that Objective-C is Objective-C, so your preference that it be like Java or JavaScript aren't valid.
Valid commentary is to do with technical issues (operation ordering, cast precedence, performance, etc), clarity (structure vs. object nature, both pro and con!), succinctness, etc.
Note, I'm of the school of rigorous quality and readability in code having worked on huge projects where code convention and quality is paramount (the write once read a thousand times paradigm).
Do not use dot for behavior. Use dot to access or set attribute like stuff, typically attributes declared as properties.
x = foo.name; // good
foo.age = 42; // good
y = x.retain; // bad
k.release; // compiler should warn, but some don't. Oops.
v.lockFocusIfCanDraw; /// ooh... no. bad bad bad
For folks new to Objective-C, I would recommend not using the dot for anything but stuff declared as #property. Once you have a feel for the language, do what feels right.
For example, I find the following perfectly natural:
k = anArray.count;
for (NSView *v in myView.subviews) { ... };
You can expect that the clang static analyzer will grow the ability to allow you to check that the dot is being used only for certain patterns or not for certain other patterns.
Let me start off by saying that I started programming in Visual/Real Basic, then moved on to Java, so I'm fairly used to dot syntax. However, when I finally moved to Objective-C and got used to brackets, then saw the introduction of Objective-C 2.0 and its dot syntax, I realized that I really don't like it. (for other languages it's fine, because that's how they roll).
I have three main beefs with dot syntax in Objective-C:
Beef #1: It makes it unclear why you might be getting errors. For example, if I have the line:
something.frame.origin.x = 42;
Then I'll get a compiler error, because something is an object, and you can't use structs of an object as the lvalue of an expression. However, if I have:
something.frame.origin.x = 42;
Then this compiles just fine, because something is a struct itself that has an NSRect member, and I can use it as an lvalue.
If I were adopting this code, I would need to spend some time trying to figure out what something is. Is it a struct? Is it an object? However, when we use the bracket syntax, it's much clearer:
[something setFrame:newFrame];
In this case, there is absolutely no ambiguity if something is an object or not. The introduction of ambiguity is my beef #1.
Beef #2: In C, dot syntax is used to access members of structs, not call methods. Programmers can override the setFoo: and foo methods of an objects, yet still access them via something.foo. In my mind, when I see expressions using dot syntax, I'm expecting them to be a simple assignation into an ivar. This is not always the case. Consider a controller object that mediates an array and a tableview. If I call myController.contentArray = newArray;, I would expect it to be replacing the old array with the new array. However, the original programmer might have overridden setContentArray: to not only set the array, but also reload the tableview. From the line, there's no indication of that behavior. If I were to see [myController setContentArray:newArray];, then I would think "Aha, a method. I need to go see the definition of this method just to make sure I know what it's doing."
So I think my summary of Beef #2 is that you can override the meaning of dot syntax with custom code.
Beef #3: I think it looks bad. As an Objective-C programmer, I'm totally used to bracket syntax, so to be reading along and see lines and lines of beautiful brackets and then to be suddenly broken with foo.name = newName; foo.size = newSize; etc is a bit distracting to me. I realize that some things require dot syntax (C structs), but that's the only time I use them.
Of course, if you're writing code for yourself, then use whatever you're comfortable with. But if you're writing code that you're planning on open sourcing, or you're writing something you don't expect to maintain forever, then I would strong encourage using bracket syntax. This is, of course, just my opinion.
Blog post against dot syntax: https://bignerdranch.com/blog/dot-notation-syntax/
Rebuttal to above post: http://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=226 (with original article in favor of dot syntax: http://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=160)
I'm a new Cocoa/Objective-C developer, and my take on it is this:
I stick to the messaging notation, even though I started with Obj-C 2.0, and even though the dot notation is more familiar feeling (Java is my first language.) My reason for this is pretty simple: I still don't understand exactly why they added the dot notation to the language. To me it seems like an unnecessary, "impure" addition. Although if anyone can explain how it benefits the language, I'd be happy to hear it.
However, I consider this a stylistic choice, and I don't think there is a right or wrong way, as long as it's consistent and readable, just as with any other stylistic choice (like putting your opening curly brace on the same line as the method header or the next line).
Objective-C dot notation is a syntactic sugar that is translated to normal message passing, so under the hood changes nothing and makes no difference at runtime. Dot notation it is absolutely not faster than message passing.
After this needed little preamble here's pros and cons seen by me :
Dot notation pros and cons
pros
readability : dot notation is easier to read than nested brackets massages passing
It simplifies interaction with Attributes and Properties: using dot notation for properties and message notation for methods you can achieve separation of state and behavior at the synthax level
It is possible to use compound assignment operator (1).
using the #property and dot notation the compiler do a lot of work for you, it can generate code for good Memory Management when getting and setting the property; this is why dot notation is suggested by Apple itself official guides.
cons
Dot notation is allowed only for access to a declared #property
Since Objective-C is a layer above standard C(language extension), the dot notation doesn’t really make clear if the accessed entity is a an object or a struct. Often, it looks like you are accessing properties of a struct.
calling a method with the dot notation you lose named parameters readability advantages
when mixed message notation and dot notation seems like you are coding in two different languages
Code Examples :
(1)Compound operator usage code example :
//Use of compound operator on a property of an object
anObject.var += 1;
//This is not possible with standard message notation
[anObject setVar:[anObject var] + 1];
Using the style of a language, consistent with the language itself, is the best advice here. However, this isn't a case of writing functional code in an OO system (or vice versa) and the dot notation is part of the syntax in Objective-C 2.0.
Any system can be misused. The existence of the preprocessor in all C based languages is enough to do really quite weird things; just look at the Obfuscated C Contest if you need to see exactly how weird it can get. Does that mean the preprocessor is automatically bad and that you should never use it?
Using the dot syntax for accessing properties, which have been defined as such in the interface, is open to abuse. The existence of abuse in potentia shouldn't necessarily be the argument against it.
Property access may have side-effects. This is orthogonal to the syntax used to acquire that property. CoreData, delegation, dynamic properties (first+last=full) will all necessarily do some work under the covers. But that would be confusing 'instance variables' with 'properties' of an object. There's no reason why properties should necessarily need to be stored as-is, especially if they can be computed (e.g. length of a String, for example). So whether you use foo.fullName or [foo fullName] there's still going to be dynamic evaluation.
Lastly, the behaviour of the property (when used as an lvalue) is defined by the object itself, like whether a copy is taken or whether it is retained. This makes it easier to change the behaviour later - in the property definition itself - rather than having to re-implement methods. That adds to the flexibility of the approach, with the resulting likelihood of less (implementation) errors occurring. There's still the possibility of choosing the wrong method (i.e. copy instead of retain) but that's an architectural rather than implementation issue.
Ultimately, it boils down to the 'does it look like a struct' question. This is probably the main differentiator in the debates so far; if you have a struct, it works differently than if you have an object. But that's always been true; you can't send a struct a message, and you need to know if it's stack-based or reference/malloc based. There are already mental models which differ in terms of usage ([[CGRect alloc] init] or struct CGRect?). They've never been unified in terms of behaviour; you need to know what you're dealing with in each case. Adding property denotation for objects is very unlikely to confuse any programmer who knows what their data types are; and if they don't, they've got bigger problems.
As for consistency; (Objective-)C is inconsistent within itself. = is used both for assignment and equality, based on lexical position in the source code. * is used for pointers and multiplication. BOOLs are chars, not bytes (or other integer value), despite YES and NO being 1 and 0 respectively. Consistency or purity isn't what the language was designed for; it was about getting things done.
So if you don't want to use it, don't use it. Get it done a different way. If you want to use it, and you understand it, it's fine if you use it. Other languages deal with the concepts of generic data structures (maps/structs) and object types (with properties), often using the same syntax for both despite the fact that one is merely a data structure and the other is a rich object. Programmers in Objective-C should have an equivalent ability to be able to deal with all styles of programming, even if it's not your preferred one.
I've mostly been raised in the Objective-C 2.0 age, and I prefer the dot notation. To me, it allows the simplification of code, instead of having extra brackets, I can just use a dot.
I also like the dot syntax because it makes me really feel like I'm accessing a property of the object, instead of just sending it a message (of course the dot-syntax really does translate into message sending, but for the sake of appearances, the dot feels different). Instead of "calling a getter" by the old syntax, it really feels like I'm directly getting something useful from the object.
Some of the debate around this is concerned with "But we already have dot-syntax, and it's for structs!". And that's true. But (and again, this is just psychological) it basically feels the same to me. Accessing a property of an object using dot-syntax feels the same as accessing a member of a struct, which is more or less the intended effect (in my opinion).
****Edit: As bbum pointed out, you can also use dot-syntax for calling any method on an object (I was unaware of this). So I will say my opinion on dot-syntax is only for dealing with properties of an object, not everyday message sending**
I use it for properties because
for ( Person *person in group.people){ ... }
is a little easier to read than
for ( Person *person in [group people]){ ... }
in the second case readability is interupted by putting your brain into message sending mode, whereas in the first case it is clear you are accessing the people property of the group object.
I will also use it when modifying a collection, for instance:
[group.people addObject:another_person];
is a bit more readable than
[[group people] addObject:another_person];
The emphasis in this case should be in the action of adding an object to the array instead of chaining two messages.
I much prefer the messaging syntax... but just because that is what I learned. Considering a lot of my classes and what not are in Objective-C 1.0 style, I wouldn't want to mix them. I have no real reason besides "what I'm used to" for not using the dot syntax... EXCEPT for this, this drives me INSANE
[myInstance.methodThatReturnsAnObject sendAMessageToIt]
I don't know why, but it really infuriates me, for no good reason. I just think that doing
[[myInstance methodThatReturnsAnObject] sendAMessageToIt]
is more readable. But to each his own!
Honestly, I think it comes down to a matter of style. I personally am against the dot syntax (especially after just finding out that you can use it for method calls and not just reading/writing variables). However, if you are going to use it, I would strong recommend not using it for anything other than accessing and changing variables.
One of the main advantages of object-oriented programming is that there is no direct access to internal state of the objects.
Dot syntax seems to me to be an attempt to make it look and feel as though state is being accessed directly. But in truth, it's just syntactic sugar over the behaviors -foo and -setFoo:. Myself, I prefer to call a spade a spade. Dot syntax helps readability to the extent that code is more succinct, but it doesn't help comprehension because failing to keep in mind that you're really calling -foo and -setFoo: could spell trouble.
Synthesized accessors seem to me to be an attempt to make it easy to write objects in which state is accessed directly. My belief is that this encourages exactly the kind of program design that object-oriented programming was created to avoid.
On balance, I would rather dot syntax and properties had never been introduced. I used to be able to tell people that ObjC is a few clean extensions to C to make it more like Smalltalk, and I don't think that's true any more.
In my opinion, the dot syntax makes Objective-C less Smalltalk-esque. It can make code look simpler, but adds ambiguity. Is it a struct, union, or object?
Many people seems to be mixing up 'properties' with 'instance variables'.
The point of the properties is to make it possible to modify the object without having to know its internals, I think. The instance variable is, most of the time, the 'implementation' of a property (which in turn is the 'interface'), but not always: sometimes a property does not correspond to an ivar, and instead it calculates a return value 'on the fly'.
That's why I believe the idea that "the dot syntax tricks you into thinking you're accessing the variable so it's confusing" is wrong. Dot or bracket, you shouldn't make assumptions about the internals: it's a Property, not an ivar.
I think I might switch to messaging instead of dot notation because in my head object.instanceVar is just instanceVar that belongs to object, to me it doesn't look at all like a method call, which it is, so there could be things going on in your accessor and whether you use instanceVar or self.instanceVar could have much more of a difference than simply implicit vs. explicit. Just my 2¢.
The dot notation tries to make messages look like accesses to a member of a struct, which they are not. Might work fine in some cases. But soon someone will come up with something like this:
NSView *myView = ...;
myView.frame.size.width = newWidth;
Looks fine. But is not. It's the same as
[myView frame].size.width = newWidth;
which doesn’t work. The compiler accepts the first, but rightfully not the second. And even if it emitted an error or warning for the first this is just confusing.
Call me lazy but if I had to type a single '.' vs. two [ ] each time to get the same results I would prefer a single . I hate verbose languages. The () in lisp drove me nuts. Elegant language such as mathematics are concise and effective, all others fall short.
Use dot notation (whenever you can)
On instance methods returning some value
Do not use dot notation
On instance methods returning void, on init methods or on Class method.
And my personal favorite exception
NSMutableArray * array = #[].mutableCopy;
I personally don't use dot-notation at all in code. I only use it in CoreData KVC binding expression when required.
The reason for not using them in code for me is that the dot-notation hides the setter semantics. Setting a property in dot-notation always looks like assignment regardless of the setter semantics (assign/retain/copy). Using the message-notation makes it visible that the receiving object has control over what happens in the setter and underlines the fact the those effects need to be considered.
I'm still considering whether I might want to use dot-notation when retrieving the value of a KVC compliant or declared property because it admittedly is a bit more compact and readable and there are no hidden semantics. Right now I'm sticking with message-notation for sake of consistency.
OK, dot notation in Objective-C looks strange, indeed. But I still can't do the following without it:
int width = self.frame.size.width;
Works fine, but:
int height = [[[self frame] size] height];
Gives me "Cannot convert to a pointer type". I'd really like to keep my code looking consistent with message notation, though.
This is a great question and I see many different answers to this. Although many have touched upon the topics, I will try to answer this from a different angle (some might have done it implicitly):
If we use the 'dot' notation, the resolution of the target for the method is done at compile time. If we use message passing, the resolution of the target is deferred to run-time execution. If the targets are resolved at compile time, the execution is faster, since resolving the targets at the run-time includes a few overheads. (Not that the time difference will matter much). Since we have defined the property in the interface of the object already, there is no point in differing the resolution of the target for a property to run-time and hence dot-notation is the notation that we should use for accessing property.