Objc oddities

There are quite a few restrictions imposed by the Objective C compiler / specification. Some of them are a little odd for a Java person though. Here are some samples:

1. All methods are public. It is up to the developer to come up with some naming strategy / convention to mark methods as non-public. Apple don't have this problem since they have reserved the methods beginning with _ to themselves…
2.  Dot notation is not recommended for accessing properties in most objc coding conventions. No further comments on this one.
3. A NSString can be mutable. So make sure you always copy a string rather than retain it. So when declaring a string poperty do somthing like this:
@property(copy, nonatomic) NSString *myStringProperty;
4. Throwing exception is poor practice. If the code uses C++ elements it is possible that memory does not get released. See Google ObjC Style Guide

So what would you want to see in the next objc release? What would make Objective C more lovable?

Cheers…

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