Cocoa® Programming

Chapter 5. Cocoa Conventions

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Naming

• Initializers

• Managing Memory

• Accessors

• Using Memory Zones

• Encoding and Decoding

Several conventions are used throughout the Cocoa frameworks. Awareness of the conventions greatly enhances the readability of code and documentation that references the frameworks. Conventions exist within most software environments. The conventions soon become second nature to programmers. Because of consistency with which the conventions are applied within the Cocoa frameworks, programmers can often guess the name of a class or method without needing the documentation.

These conventions are not part of the Objective-C language. Some of the conventions, such as variable naming, were originally arbitrary, but have become ...