Re: PATCH: Find more ObjC methods

[Ziemowit Laski]

On Friday, Oct 3, 2003, at 12:00 US/Pacific, Devang Patel wrote:

> On Oct 3, 2003, at 2:57 AM, David Ayers wrote:
>
> >  [self somePrivatMethod]; /* <- should not see the prototype and 
> > warn! */
>
> Does this mean that using private methods, that are not included
> in @interface, is not a good idea? I think, compiler should figure
> out that it is part @implementation and not warn about it.

Well, Objective-C plays it fast and loose here (as in many other 
places). :-)  On the one hand,
you're definitely encouraged to provide an @interface for your class in 
a header that other
translation units can pull in.  But on the other, you do not _need_ to 
provide an @interface at
all!  It may not be very polite, but if the @implementation contains 
the required ivars,
the compiler knows what to do.

Furthermore, methods in Objective-C are not 'private' (or 'protected') 
in the C++ sense;
all methods _are_ visible to the runtime.  So, in the example above, 
the program definitely
_will_ call 'somePrivateMethod'.  Also, since we happened to see the 
@implementation in this
case, we can actually determine which 'somePrivateMethod' this will be.

--Zem
--------------------------------------------------------------
Ziemowit Laski                 1 Infinite Loop, MS 301-2K
Mac OS X Compiler Group        Cupertino, CA USA  95014-2083
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