I've been coding on and off in Objective-C for several years, and recently I've decided to get back into it to work on a little project that I've done several times over, but this time I just wanted to do it in Objective-C and on the Mac. It's been a while, and I wanted to make sure I still remembered all the neat things the platform had to offer.
Holy Cow! I had forgotten how elegant and beautiful Objective-C is and the Cocoa frameworks in particular are. The code is just so incredibly expressive and wonderful, it's hard to imagine why someone would purposefully choose to not code in this language.
Amazing.
Writing the C++ equivalent of the copy constructor is so wonderful:
- (id) copyWithZone:(NSZone*)zone
/*"
** This is the standard copy method for the Legend so that we can make
** clean copies without having to worry about all the details. It's a nice
** deep copy, where the contents of the returned Legend are the same as
** this instance's.
"*/
{
// simply use the allocWithZone and populate it properly - easy
return [[[Legend allocWithZone:zone] initWithMap:[self getMap]] autorelease];
}
where I had already created the setMap and getMap methods because they are the setters and getters for the class. It's so easy.
Yup, the more I code in ObjC, the more I realize I shouldn't be coding in anything else. It's just too much fun.
UPDATE: I read about headerDoc in the Xcode docs, and it seems to be the new AutoDoc documentation generator. So I changed the comments on my code to be more in-line with that, and as a benefit, they look more like my C++ comments, and that's a big win in my book:
/*!
This is the standard copy method for the Legend so that we can make
clean copies without having to worry about all the details. It's a nice
deep copy, where the contents of the returned Legend are the same as
this instance's.
*/
- (id) copyWithZone:(NSZone*)zone
{
// simply use the allocWithZone and populate it properly - easy
return [[[Legend allocWithZone:zone] initWithMap:[self getMap]] autorelease];
}
