Comments on: Accessor Methods

By: Erik J. Barzeski

Erik J. Barzeski — Wed, 18 Jun 2003 23:02:11 +0000

Uh, you're missing a lot. More than I have time to discuss here. Research this on your own. The short version: you miss the ability to manage memory, do logic and bounds-checking, etc.

By: trystero montevideo

trystero montevideo — Wed, 18 Jun 2003 21:06:25 +0000

I also don't get the need for accessor methods at all. If I declare a variable in the header and set its value to someting can I not just access its value directly from another object as long as I retain it? what am I missing here...

clarity greatly appreciated!

By: Personal vs. Private | NSLog();

Personal vs. Private | NSLog(); — Sun, 18 May 2003 21:49:49 +0000

Jamie's written in a far better manner than I could an entry discussing the self-censorship one must apply to their blogging. She also links to...

By: Accessor Methods, Part 2 | NSLog();

Accessor Methods, Part 2 | NSLog(); — Sat, 17 May 2003 17:15:27 +0000

I wrote about accessor methods in Cocoa before. One of the comments on that article implored me to check out Ali Ozer's talk at WWDC....

By: Kynn

Kynn — Sat, 10 May 2003 04:47:01 +0000

Erik, thanks! You're a champ.

--Kynn

By: ssp

ssp — Tue, 06 May 2003 20:52:18 +0000

I am sure there is a way that fits most

I am equally sure that programmers - being the smart people that they are - could come up with a way where you'd still be able to have your own accessor methods override the default ones.

But I'm the one who dreams of garbage collection. I never wrote a program that would've suffered by the perfomance hit by having garbage collection either.

I have many other questionable opinions on programming as well

By: Erik J. Barzeski

Erik J. Barzeski — Tue, 06 May 2003 20:15:20 +0000

ssp: As a later post of mine (I'll TrackBack this article) will illustrate, it's good that we still write accessors because the differences between two different ways of writing them have impact: performance, memory, threading, etc. There is no "one size fits all" solution.

Kynn: read Apple's "The Objective-C Programming Language" and look at tutorials online (http://cocoadevcentral.com/ is a good place to start).

By: ssp

ssp — Tue, 06 May 2003 20:02:45 +0000

Aren't accessor methods a constant pain. You'll have to add them (not to mention the redundant header information), you'll have to change them when changing a variable name. There are 'bad' ways of doing it, like the autorelease example above.

Why doesn't the IDE simply and transparently generate them for you?

Doesn't sound like it should be a technical problem.

By: Kynn

Kynn — Tue, 06 May 2003 19:53:28 +0000

Okay, dumb question for ya all (especially Erik, since it's his blog, but the rest of you too):

I haven't programmed in C since, oh gads, the dark ages of 1987 or so. I am fairly up on the concept of OO in theory, although I've never programmed in C++. (Most of my programming in the last 10 years or so has been in Perl.)

Where should I start learning/relearning Objective C? I want to get into programming on Mac OS X, so I'd appreciate pointers.

Feel free to write this up as a separate post on your blog and zap me the address, if you're going to make a long write-up of it. I'm sure I'm not the only one asking these kinds of questions. [Also feel free to ignore me completely!]

--Kynn

By: Erik J. Barzeski

Erik J. Barzeski — Tue, 06 May 2003 13:19:59 +0000

Thomas, be fair. The second method handles all three as well. So does the third. And the fourth. Obviously some test, but a test is very, very fast. It's a pointer comparison - very quick. You can probably run a hundred pointer comparisons in the time it takes you to retain and autorelease something.