A while back, I wrote an object-oriented dispatch system for Objective-C. It defines only three things: an object type (the BlockObject), a way to create new objects (the BlockConstructor), and a way to message objects (the dispatch mechanism).
That’s all that the first version of Objective-C defines, as documented in Brad Cox’s Object-Oriented Programming: an Evolutionary Approach.
Objective-C is a hybrid programming language[…]formed by grafting the Smalltalk-80 style of object-oriented programming onto a C language rootstock. Objective-C adds precisely one new data type, the object, to those C provides already, and precisely one new operation, the message expression. Like Smalltalk-80, Objective-C makes no compile-time distinction between different kinds (classes) of objects.
So if you want to try out 1980s-style OOP using Objective-C, the tool to use is not Objective-C itself but BlockObject.
That quote is from the start of Chapter Four (of the Cox edition, not the Cox and Novolbilski edition), which goes on to describe the Objective-C preprocessor, the multiple-dispatch system (using strings as message selectors like BlockObject does—and indeed like Apple’s ObjC does albeit hidden behind the opaque SEL type), and the _msg C function that implements message dispatch.
Factory Objects
Having objects is all very well, but we need some way to create them. In the BlockObject system, there’s a special type called BlockConstructor that configures and returns a new instance of an object.
That’s boring. Objective-C doesn’t define a “constructor type”, can’t we just use objects? Well, yes. Given a class definition like this:
= Stack : Object { id *objects; unsigned int count; }
Objective-C as-was automatically defines a global factory object called Stack that can be used anywhere in the code. You grab it and use it like this:
extern id Stack; id myStack = [Stack new]; [myStack push: someObject];
From there, Objective-C won’t surprise you much. You can define instance methods:
-push:anObject {
if (count == MAX_OBJECTS) [self cannotGrow];
objects[count++] = anObject;
return self;
}
and factory methods:
+new {
id stack = [super new];
stack->objects = malloc(MAX_OBJECTS * sizeof(id));
return stack;
}
Though users of “modern” Objective-C will notice that there’s no compile-time type checking: no Stack *stack variable declaration for example. Indeed there’s no @interface for the class at all; all objects are of type id, you can send any message to any object and what it does with that message is up to the receiver. Just like Smalltalk or Ruby.
