Objective C
<language> An
object-oriented superset of
ANSI C by Brad Cox, Productivity Products.
Its additions to
C are few and are mostly based on
Smalltalk.
Objective C is implemented as a
preprocessor for
C.
Its
syntax is a superset of standard C syntax, and its
compiler accepts both C and Objective C
source code (
filename extension ".m").
It has no operator
overloading,
multiple inheritance, or class variables.
It does have
dynamic binding.
It is used as the system programming language on the NeXT.
As implemented for
NEXTSTEP, the Objective C language is fully compatible with
ANSI C.
Objective C can also be used as an extension to
C++, which lacks some of the possibilities for
object-oriented design that
dynamic typing and
dynamic binding bring to Objective C.
C++ also has features not found in Objective C.
Versions exist for
MS-DOS,
Macintosh,
VAX/
VMS and
Unix workstations.
Language versions by Stepstone, NeXT and
GNU are slightly different.
There is a library of (
GNU) Objective C objects by R. Andrew McCallum <
[email protected]> with similar functionality to
Smalltalk's Collection objects.
It includes: Set, Bag,
Array, LinkedList, LinkList, CircularArray,
Queue,
Stack,
Heap, SortedArray, MappedCollector, GapArray and DelegateList.
Version: Alpha Release.
(ftp://iesd.auc.dk/pub/ObjC/).
See also:
Objectionable-C.
["Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach", Brad Cox, A-W 1986].
