On 14 May '08, at 10:16 PM, David Wilson wrote:
3) Instance methods (with the -) are virtual functions. Class methods (with the +) are static functions.
Class methods aren't exactly like static functions, because they're still dynamically dispatched and can be overridden by subclasses.
A closer analogy is to think of there being a singleton "class object" for every class (which is what -class returns), and the class methods are instance methods of those class objects. The class objects have an inheritance hierarchy that parallels the class hierarchy, so if B is a subclass of A, B's class object will be a subclas of A's class object.
(For more detail, look up "metaclass"; I'm sure there's an abstruse Wikipedia article about it. The concept goes back to Smalltalk-80, on which Objective-C's runtime model and syntax were based.)
—JensPS: In regards to the thread subject, I didn't find Cocoa to have a steep learning curve. I took a training class and was amazed at how easy it was to learn, and to build sophisticated apps with, compared to every other GUI API or framework I'd used.
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