🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug28.182704.10020@cs.mcgill.ca> samurai@uriel.cs.mgill.ca writes:
...referring to type checking...
>Isn't ANSI C pretty strong about this? I know gcc2.2.2 drives me
>WILD with warnings :-). And Objective C (well, NeXT's anyway)
>is ANSI.
...

Recall that Stepstone's compiler is a precompiler which generates C
code as output.

Stepstone's Objective-C compiler accepts ANSI C and generates ANSI or
K&R variants depending on whether it is used with ANSI or K&R
compilers.  It will do type checking of messages to objects whose
types are statically defined, e.g.:

    Foo *aFoo;
    ...
    [aFoo blech];

will verify that objects of type Foo respond to the blech message.  A
diagnostic will be generated if it does not.

One objection to runtime dispatching of messages which is often made
by the C++ advocates is that you may get "doesNotRecognize" errors
during runtime if your code is not statically checked by the compiler.
My answer to this is:
  You mean you don't test your code?

It has been my experience that doesNotRecognize errors are generally
easy to find and fix.

That is in contrast to the correction of memory leaks and messages to
freed objects.  The former is easy to detect and often very hard to
understand and fix.  The latter is usually easily detected by the
Objective-C runtime, but is sometimes very hard to detect and may take
days to understand and fix.


-- 
Kenneth Lerman                  ...!uunet!casey!gaboon!seltd!lerman
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