Re: Objective-C and it's future

FROM : Gregory Weston
DATE : Sat Jul 08 03:00:11 2006

Thomas Davie wrote:

> However, when we are dealing with much more abstract concepts such as
> objects, we generally know what our data structures are.  We know how
> they are going to be used, and we know what they should and should
> not do.


But notice what you said there. Or what you didn't. You indicated 
that we know and care about _behavior_. Not structure, nor 
appearance, nor type. We just want to know that when we send "this 
message" we'll get a response that, itself, only needs to conform to 
certain behavior. We don't really want collections to be of certain 
specific types because there's no reason to restrict a collection to 
holding only one type of data. That may not be so obvious for a 
traditional integer-index array, but consider an associative array. I 
rarely want a dictionary in which _every_ key is a string and _every_ 
value is a numeric value.