RE: objective-c question: get selector by ascii name

[Steven J Clark]

I had similar trouble finding obj_lookUpClass.  I guess gnu, in its
infinite wisdom, decided to point everyone at the NeXT documentation and
then implement something different.  I started out looking for
objc/objc.h.  When I didn't find that anywhere, I looked at symbols in
the executable with nm, found the name was probably "obj_lookup_class"
and started using grep on .h files.  I also looked at symbols in
libraries to see who defined it.

My gcc seems to be installed differently.  There's a gnu "home"
directory complete with bin, lib, man, include, and other
subdirectories.  The objc-api.h file is *not* in gnu/include of course,
it's in
gnu/lib/gcc-lib/sparc-sun-solaris2.5/2.7.2.1/include/objc/objc-api.h.  I
don't know why I didn't just look there first, wouldn't anybody?

I somehow missed gnu/include/objects/objc-gnu2next.h that has #defines
for all the NeXT-ish names.  I think it's really the best place to look.

The Objc runtime is really great, it's almost as good as Lisp or
Smalltalk.  You can find the names and types of the instance variables
as well as class names, so for example you can code an object loader
that knows nothing at all about the objects it will load until runtime.
It looks as if the Swarm Probes do the same thing.

So, how's the Java port coming?

Steven J. Clark    address@hidden    313-769-4396
Center for Electronic Commerce, Industrial Technology Institute
Box 1485, Ann Arbor, MI 48106


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