On 19/07/2012, at 1:33 AM, Alex Zavatone wrote:
> Ah, yes, when coding, of course. For some reason, I was expecting that
> during runtime/debugging, if you know the name of an object or you are
> accessing a object your coworker wrote there was some concept that instantly
> told you its class and makeup.
Well, there is - you can use the runtime functions to delve into the class
hierarchy of an object.
But that's not how you write code.
If you are using code a co-worker wrote then you use the documentation that the
co-worker provided to make use of it. And by documentation I mean the headers -
they are the "contract" which his code promises to abide by. If a property is
declared to return a string and it doesn't, that's a bug, pure and simple. The
same headers told you the names of the properties - how else would you know
them? Property declarations link a name to a type. If every property were typed
'id' however and you were expected to examine the type at runtime, then your
co-worker should probably be pensioned off rather quickly. Where a type is
returned as 'id', it means that any object can be returned, and that's a hint
that your code should not need to care what it is, and so, if you find yourself
needing to know, that could be a code smell that something's amiss in your
approach.
Note that -isKindOfClass only tells you whether an object is a given class or a
subclass of it, it returns a BOOL. So it's only there to confirm what you
already expect, or to reject silly mistakes, like passing in the wrong kind of
object to something that must have another kind.
If you do something like this:
NSString* theType = NSStringFromClass([someObject class]);
if([theType isEqualToString:@"classTypeA"])
{
[self doStuffForClassAType:someObject];
}
else if( [theType isEqualToString:@"classTypeB"])
{
[self doStuffForClassBType:someObject];
}
else if .....
then that's really violating the spirit and intention of object-oriented
programming.
--Graham
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