Learn Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Chapter 25. Mac OS X Development: Objective-C

Apple, when its soul was still called NeXT, sought to speak with its beautiful hardware. No crude language like C, nor the insanity of C++, would do. Instead, it adopted an odd little chimera of a thing called Objective-C. ObjC, to friends, was the project of computer scientist Brad Cox, who wanted to rewrite Smalltalk as a dialect of C.

Objective-C is a true superset of C, making it 100 percent compatible with C—a feature sorely missing from C++. That means you can drop into C when it's convenient. It also gives you access to about half the code ever written. And, lest we not forget, Mac OS X is UNIX, and C is the language of UNIX.

Note

Objective-C can also host C++, albeit awkwardly (as it always is ...