Brief history of the "square brackets" as I remember it.
One of the most challenging aspects of the language are the square brackets because they look like arrays, as you just mention.
As I remember the language was inspired in smalltalk, but using C to gain speed.
The idea behind smalltalk was to send message as we do with real life objects. For instance if I ask you your age I would say something like this in natural language:
iain what is your age?
And in smalltalk:
iain whatIsYourAge
In smalltalk everything is an object, thus you can send the following message to the number 5.
5 factorial
Well.. to make the parser faster and easier to understand in Objective-C messages where enclosed in square brackets.
[iain whatIsYourAge];
Which has the same meaning as functions or methods in "dot" languages like Java, C# and C++
iain.whatIsYourAge();
But I guess they did not think about messages as functions, but something more "natural". Today we are so used to the "dot" and the "()" syntax, that we don't even notice how "unatural" they are anymore..
The methods in Objective-C can also return values, and also receive parameters in their arguments.
For instance assuming we are still working with iain as an object, the following Java:
Broom broom = new Broom();
Date now = new Date();
iain.cleanYourRoomUsing( now, broom );
Would be more natural in Objective-C
Broom* aBroom = [Broom broom];
Date* now = [Date date];
[iain cleanYourRoom:now withCleaningTool:broom];
Of course you can also put them in the same line
// "dot" languages java, c++, c#
iain.cleanYourRoom( new Date() , new Broom() );
//Objective-C
[iain cleanYourRoom:[Date date] withCleaningTool:[Broom broom]];
And that's pretty much it. The idea behind Obj-C was to do what smalltalk did, but a lot faster.
The declarations changes of course , but the idea is not too different.
It was something like:
@implementation Man : Person
- ( void ) cleanYourRoom: (Date *) when withCleaningTool: (Broom *) what
{
[self yeahSure];
etc...
}
@end
It would be the "equivalent of "
class Man extends Person {
public void cleanYourRoom( Date when, Broom what ){
this.yeahSure();
etc...
}
}
I learn Objective-C some 10 yrs ago, using WebObjects on Mac OS X server ( based on NextStep ), so this is not at tutorial at all, there are plenty of resources for that. But instead is a brief history of the "square brackets" and I hope it helps to understand them better.
Please feel free to modify this comment to make it "Objective-C" valid :P
Thank you.