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. .

See also: Objectionable-C.

["Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach", Brad

Cox, A-W 1986].

(1999-07-10)