On 31/05/2011, at 8:57 AM, Greg Guerin wrote:

> julius wrote:
> 
>> My question is
>> Why did Cocoa developers make NSArray count return NSUInteger?
> 
> In a practical sense, none of this matters.  The decision was made long, long 
> ago.  It is what it is.  You're too late to save that sheep from drowning.


No API is perfect, and Cocoa is no exception. I learned a long time ago that 
it's a bit pointless to fret about the why and just understand how it is. That 
way, you get your apps written and out of the door. There are plenty of 
questionable and strange things in Cocoa that in hindsight could have been done 
better, or at least differently, but they weren't.

In NSArray in particular, a more interesting thing which is both a good and bad 
thing depending on the hour of the day, is that you can't specify, find out or 
restrict the object types it holds. Obj-C has no syntax (as C++ does, for 
better or worse) for templating collection types. In practice this doesn't 
matter, even though sometimes it causes bugs, just as faulty signed/unsigned 
arithmetic causes bugs. In the end, no language can save you from yourself.

--Graham


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