Objective C (redirected from Objective-C)

Objective C

The first commercial object-oriented version of the C programming language. Objective C is mostly used to write Mac OS X and GNUstep applications, which are created in the OpenStep development environment. Applications use the Mac's Cocoa object library or the GNUstep library, which is part of many Linux distributions. Windows versions are also available, and numerous hardware platforms are supported under the GNU gcc compiler.

A superset of the C language, most C programs can be compiled with an Objective C compiler. Objective C requires a runtime module that is considerably more lightweight than virtual machines used by languages such as Java. Originally developed by the Stepstone Corporation, it was licensed by NeXT Computer (later acquired by Apple) and made part of NeXT's OpenStep. See OpenStep, GNUstep and object-oriented programming.

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Objective C - 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 <mccallum@cs.rochester.edu> 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. ftp://iesd.auc.dk/pub/ObjC/. See also: Objectionable-C. ["Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach", Brad Cox, A-W 1986].