When most people think of Cocoa, they think of Objective-C. In the NeXT days, Objective-C was the only way of developing for OpenStep. With OS X 10.0, Java was supported as well, and with recent releases other languages have had support added, but Objective-C remains the standard language for Cocoa development.
Objective-C itself has evolved a lot over the years. Under the direction of NeXT, it remained relatively static, but each release of OS X has introduced new versions. Java-like keywords for exception handling and synchronization were added over the years, and 10.5 introduced a complete break in compatibility and a new version of the language: Objective-C 2.0. 64-bit Cocoa and Objective-C 2.0 are both only supported on 10.5 and later, and using either means that you are using a completely new Objective-C runtime library. This incorporates a number of changes to make it easier to improve in the future.
Alan Kay, who coined the term object orientation described it as:
Simple computers, communicating by message passing.
Dan Ingalls, who implemented most of the original Smalltalk system, proposed the following test:
Can you define a new kind of integer, put your new integers into rectangles (which are already part of the window system), ask the system to blacken a rectangle, and have everything work?
Smalltalk was the first pure object-oriented language, and one from which Objective-C gains a lot of inspiration. Both the object model and syntax of Objective-C come directly from Smalltalk. It has sometimes been referred to affectionately as “the bastard child of C and Smalltalk.”
The Smalltalk model is very simple. Objects are simple models of computers that send and receive messages. How they handle these messages is entirely up to them, but most use a class as a template. An object has a pointer to its class and delegates the mapping from message names to methods to this class. The class may delegate it again to another class. This delegation between classes is known as inheritance.
If the chain of classes does not know how to implement a specific method, then the object is sent a doesNotUnderstand: message containing an object encapsulating the original message as an argument. In Cocoa, the equivalent message is forwardInvocation:, which receives an NSInvocation object as an argument. This is referred to as the second-chance dispatch mechanism. When a class has failed to find a method, the object gets a second chance to try to handle the method. On OS X, this is around 600 times slower than a direct message send, so it should not be used in performance-critical code, but it does add a lot of flexibility where required.
Because everything is an object in Smalltalk, classes are also objects. They can receive messages and respond to them. In both Smalltalk and Objective-C, message lookup for a class is handled by a metaclass; a class for a class. Smalltalk does more with this abstraction than Objective-C. It is very rare to deal with a metaclass directly in Objective-C. In implementation an Objective-C MetaClass is just a typedef for a Class, although a flag is set in the body of the class to indicate that it is a metaclass.
It is important to understand the distinction between sending a message in the Objective-C or Smalltalk sense, and calling a method in the C++ or Simula sense. When you call a method, you are effectively calling a function, with a hidden pointer to the object. If the function is declared as virtual, then you may get a different function for each class, but the mapping is static. Sending a message is a higher-level abstraction than this. The mapping between method names (selectors) and methods is dynamic. It does not depend on what the caller thinks the class is, only on what the class really is and whether the object implements second-chance dispatch.
A dialect of Smalltalk called F-Script is available for scripting on OS X, and ´Etoil´e contains a Smalltalk compiler that allows it to be used for OpenStep programming with GNUstep, although it currently only supports the GNU Objective-C runtime and so is not available on OS X.
Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)
Objective-C itself has evolved a lot over the years. Under the direction of NeXT, it remained relatively static, but each release of OS X has introduced new versions. Java-like keywords for exception handling and synchronization were added over the years, and 10.5 introduced a complete break in compatibility and a new version of the language: Objective-C 2.0. 64-bit Cocoa and Objective-C 2.0 are both only supported on 10.5 and later, and using either means that you are using a completely new Objective-C runtime library. This incorporates a number of changes to make it easier to improve in the future.
Alan Kay, who coined the term object orientation described it as:
Simple computers, communicating by message passing.
Dan Ingalls, who implemented most of the original Smalltalk system, proposed the following test:
Can you define a new kind of integer, put your new integers into rectangles (which are already part of the window system), ask the system to blacken a rectangle, and have everything work?
Smalltalk was the first pure object-oriented language, and one from which Objective-C gains a lot of inspiration. Both the object model and syntax of Objective-C come directly from Smalltalk. It has sometimes been referred to affectionately as “the bastard child of C and Smalltalk.”
The Smalltalk model is very simple. Objects are simple models of computers that send and receive messages. How they handle these messages is entirely up to them, but most use a class as a template. An object has a pointer to its class and delegates the mapping from message names to methods to this class. The class may delegate it again to another class. This delegation between classes is known as inheritance.
If the chain of classes does not know how to implement a specific method, then the object is sent a doesNotUnderstand: message containing an object encapsulating the original message as an argument. In Cocoa, the equivalent message is forwardInvocation:, which receives an NSInvocation object as an argument. This is referred to as the second-chance dispatch mechanism. When a class has failed to find a method, the object gets a second chance to try to handle the method. On OS X, this is around 600 times slower than a direct message send, so it should not be used in performance-critical code, but it does add a lot of flexibility where required.
Because everything is an object in Smalltalk, classes are also objects. They can receive messages and respond to them. In both Smalltalk and Objective-C, message lookup for a class is handled by a metaclass; a class for a class. Smalltalk does more with this abstraction than Objective-C. It is very rare to deal with a metaclass directly in Objective-C. In implementation an Objective-C MetaClass is just a typedef for a Class, although a flag is set in the body of the class to indicate that it is a metaclass.
It is important to understand the distinction between sending a message in the Objective-C or Smalltalk sense, and calling a method in the C++ or Simula sense. When you call a method, you are effectively calling a function, with a hidden pointer to the object. If the function is declared as virtual, then you may get a different function for each class, but the mapping is static. Sending a message is a higher-level abstraction than this. The mapping between method names (selectors) and methods is dynamic. It does not depend on what the caller thinks the class is, only on what the class really is and whether the object implements second-chance dispatch.
A dialect of Smalltalk called F-Script is available for scripting on OS X, and ´Etoil´e contains a Smalltalk compiler that allows it to be used for OpenStep programming with GNUstep, although it currently only supports the GNU Objective-C runtime and so is not available on OS X.
Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)
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