< language > An object-oriented superset of ANSI C by Brad Cox, Productivity Products. Its additions to C are few and are mostly based on Smalltalk . Objective C is implemented as a preprocessor for C . Its syntax is a superset of standard C syntax, and its compiler accepts both C and Objective C source code ( filename extension ".m").
It has no operator overloading , multiple inheritance , or class variables . It does have dynamic binding . It is used as the system programming language on the NeXT . As implemented for NEXTSTEP , the Objective C language is fully compatible with ANSI C .
Objective C can also be used as an extension to C++ , which lacks some of the possibilities for object-oriented design that dynamic typing and dynamic binding bring to Objective C. C++ also has features not found in Objective C.
Versions exist for MS-DOS , Macintosh , VAX / VMS and Unix workstation s. Language versions by Stepstone , NeXT and GNU are slightly different.
There is a library of ( GNU ) Objective C objects by R. Andrew McCallum mccallum@cs.rochester.edu with similar functionality to Smalltalk 's Collection objects. It includes: Set, Bag , Array , LinkedList, LinkList, CircularArray, Queue , Stack , Heap , SortedArray, MappedCollector, GapArray and DelegateList. Version: Alpha Release. ftp://iesd.auc.dk/pub/ObjC/ .
See also: Objectionable-C .
["Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach", Brad Cox, A-W 1986].
(1999-07-10)