On Oct 4, 2013, at 11:30 AM, Tom Davie <tom.da...@gmail.com> wrote: > The more mathematically correct thing to do (and what it does for all other > types) is “I don’t know what it is, so I can’t ‘prove’* anything at all about > whether this is correct, therefore it’s not correct. Puny human, you must > provide me with more information to make proofs”.
It’s only mathematically correct if you are talking about a strong type system as in C++/Java/Haskell/etc. But Objective-C has a mixture of strong and dynamic typing, and in fact the dynamic typing is older: in the original Objective-C language the only object reference type was ‘id’, and typed object pointers were added later. IMHO the mixture of static and dynamic typing is very useful; most of the time you get good compile-time checking, and the exceptions to that are to avoid the kind of rat-holing into parameterized types that adds so much complexity to C++. (Or if you want to think about it in non-OOP terms, ‘id’ is the Obj-C equivalent of C’s ‘void*’, but not C++’s ‘void*’.) tl;dr: Both static and dynamic typing are valid language designs, and both are extremely popular. One is not more “correct” than the other. —Jens _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
