Kevin Vance (weblog of)

That's about the size of it. Objective-C's handling of primitive types does suck, due to the lack of autoboxing.

Suppose there was a better number object that was actually mutable. It's not as bad to do something like:

[[a objectAtIndex:2] add:1];

As far as array creation blowing, I've written some macros to help with that. http://iamthewalr.us/projects/cbobjectcreationmacros/

(Reply) (Thread)

Those macros look great. Yeah, the nil termination seemed out-of-place to me. It's a language with properties and garbage collection, but don't forget about NULL termination!

In real life, I had an NSDictionary mapping strings to integers, and I couldn't believe the code I ended up with to increment/decrement them.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

The nil termination is, as you likely know, due to the braindead nature of C's va_arg nonsense.

Typically, with a dict, I think it'd be more readable to do:

int x = [[dict objectForKey:key] intValue];
x++; // or whatever
[dict setObject:[NSNumber numberWithInt:x] forKey:key];

It's easier that way to just let your eyes glaze over the BS you have to do to get/set and you can just focus on x++; or whatever you end up doing to it.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Yes, I thought it seemed very C-like.

Thanks for the suggestion; that looks nice and clear.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

One of the best and worst things about Objective-C is that it's a direct superset of C. "Objects" are just structs with a particular layout; "Methods" are just functions that take two hidden arguments; etc.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)