<
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 <
mccallum@cs.rochester.edu> 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].
(1999-07-10)