Cocoa and Carbon

FROM : Gerriet M. Denkmann
DATE : Wed May 14 16:21:13 2008

I always thought that Cocoa is an Objective-C API, which is a more 
convenient counterpart to the more verbose or more cumbersome C API 
of Carbon, which often gives more detailed control though.

E.g. NSString has stringWithContentsOfFile:usedEncoding:error:, but 
Carbon has a Text Encoding Conversion Manager (ADC Home > Reference 
Library > Reference > Carbon > Text & Fonts > Text Encoding 
Conversion Manager Reference) with dozens of functions.


But then there is something like a "Carbon application" which seems 
to be different from "application which uses (mostly?, exclusively?) 
the Carbon C API".
For example, there is NSApplicationLoad, which is the "Startup 
function to call when running Cocoa code from a Carbon application."

So: what is the real difference between a "Carbon application" and a 
Cocoa one? Why would one create a Carbon application?

Kind regards,

Gerriet.