Re: [swarm-hackers] Naming conventions

[Bill Northcott]

On 17/11/2009, at 3:59 PM, Scott Christley wrote:

> Gosh!  How dare Apple make up a convention after Swarm was written!  They 
> could have at least consulted us  ;-D
> 
> We subclass very few of Apple's classes, only NSObject actually, so we should 
> be okay.

which takes me back to the question I asked a few days back:

As I understand the Objective-C class structure, the root object as created in 
the runtime is Object and NSObject is a subclass of Object.

As I understood the old version of Swarm it separately subclassed Object, thus 
avoiding adopting NSObject protocols.

Am I correct to understand that your latest code creates the Swarm classes as 
subclasses of NSObject?  Is this what the openstep build flag does?

Do the resulting Swarm objects understand both 'new' and 'create' instantiation 
methods?  (I understand that mixing them is a quick way to a crash.)  Would 
this mean that they are 'first class' Cocoa objects, but that one should never 
invoke a Cocoa method on a Swarm object even though introspection would show it 
as available?

IMHO this all needs some documentation.  Maybe Nima might have his Wiki pages 
as part of the Swarm Wiki so that they might form a basis for such 
documentation.

Cheers
Bill

PS  The use of underscore for private methods is in GNUstep coding standards in 
June 1996 
(http://www.gnustep.org/resources/documentation/Developer/CodingStandards/coding-standards.pdf).
  So I expect Swarm just adopted it like all other Objective-C coders, before 
anyone thought too hard about the implications.

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