Defacto standards (was Re: bogus retain via NSEnumerator)

[Gregory John Casamento]

--- David Stes <stes@D5E02AFE.kabel.telenet.be> wrote:
> In comp.lang.objective-c Sherm Pendley <spamtrap@dot-app.org> wrote:
> > 
> > It's a place where NeXT never existed, POC is
> > the only Objective-C implementation, 

In the absence of a standard filed with an agency such as ISO or ANSI, defacto
standards are what are used to define what a given thing is or is not (the
essence of a standard).  Let's examine this for a second:

1) Brad Cox sold the rights to the Objective-C language to Apple, so they own
the spec.  Apple literally dictates what is or is not objective-C in the same
way that Sun says what is or is not Java.

2) Cocoa/OpenStep code comprises probably around 95%-98% of all existing
Objective-C code, the other 2%-5% is likely from legacy Stepstone Objective-C
users.

So where, precisely, do you get off calling POC "Objective-C" in the first
place when it doesn't contain many of the enhancements that Apple has added
over the years and is completely, to my knowledge, incompatible for compiling
GNUstep or for use on Mac OS X (using the Cocoa classes)?

The best that Portable Object Compiler can be called is a language which
*looks* like Objective-C, but has none of the other enhancements or niceties of
the Language which Apple uses.  Besides, how many people really use POC anyway?
 Five? Ten? Okay... maybe Twenty.

I believe what you really need to do is to either find a way to enhance the
existing Objective-C implementation to your liking or modify POC to be closer
to the established standard.

> POC (http://users.pandora.be/stes/compiler.html) at least doesn't use the
> crippled Apple memory management.
> 
> The Apple memory management is especially inferior for stuff like 
> enumerators, because you are forced to keep a counter of how many times you
> are autoreleasing inside a loop.  The reason is that "modulo" a certain
> number of loop iterations, you have to free the pool yourself or it will
> consume all memory.  In fact, it may be that you have plenty of memory left,
> but just that the stupid autoreleasepool is using all of it ...

You're example is pure hyperbole.  

GJC

=====
Gregory John Casamento -- CEO/President Open Logic Corp.


        
                
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