On Dec 5, 2008, at 7:55 PM, Jerry Krinock wrote:
I understand why this must be so, but it makes the dot syntax
difficult to use in practice. When writing a message, I have to
stop and think, "Gee did I declare that as a property or not?" If
I'm not sure, and have to click to my documentation, it's faster to
just put in the square brackets.
No -- the dot syntax is 100% orthogonal to the @property syntax.
Entirely independent of each other.
The only requirement of the . syntax is that the type -- the class --
of the object on the left side of the . must be known and must contain
a declaration specifying the type to be set or returned, either
through @property or through traditional method declarations.
Also, it seems to me that that dot syntax makes more fragile code.
For example, say that I declare a 'name' property. Then, next week
I decide that I need a more granular name, so replace this property
with a firstName and lastName property, and a -name accessor which
concatenates firstName and lastName.
If I had accessed 'name' in other files using the square bracket
syntax, everything is still OK. But if I had accessed it using the
dot syntax, I now have dot abuse.
Not really. 'name' is still something that is an accessor type thing,
regardless of whether it is derived or declared via @property()
"dot abuse" refers to expressions like:
foo.retain;
bar.lockFocusIfCanDraw;
That is, expressions where you aren't really asking the object to
retrieve some value, but are more or less telling the object to do
something and return a result.
And, yes, there are grey areas.
b.bum
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