Programming in Objective-C

1. Introduction

The “C” programming language was pioneered by Dennis Ritchie at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s. It was not until the late 1970s, however, that this programming language began to gain widespread popularity and support. This was because until that time C compilers were not readily available for commercial use outside of Bell Laboratories. Initially, C's growth in popularity was also spurred on in part by the equal, if not faster, growth in popularity of the Unix operating system, which was written almost entirely in C.

The Objective-C language was designed by Brad J. Cox in the early 1980s. The language was based on a language called SmallTalk-80. Objective-C was layered on top of the C language, meaning extensions were ...