Re: Syntactic sugar to access arrays and hashes in Objective-C

[John Holdsworth <mac at johnholdsworth dot com>]

Hi David,

Thanks for the reply, I've managed to find a solution for my needs in  
the end.
It turns out the Apple gcc compiler supports mixing C++ and Objective-C
in the same source file so I've been able to implement what I was  
looking
for using operator overloading - a much more flexible solution that  
doesn't
require the compiler to have knowledge of Apple's XCode core libraries.

I've attached the source, its a rather odd hybrid to say the least:

The documentation is here:
http://johnholdsworth.com/objcpp/html

I need to write the unit tests now.. I'm not sure its saved me any  
time in reality
but it was an interesting digression and hopefully it will be useful  
to somebody :)

Attachment: objcpp.h
Description: Binary data

Cheers,

John Holdsworth

On 8 Apr 2009, at 14:34, David Ayers wrote:

> Am Samstag, den 21.03.2009, 11:59 +0100 schrieb John Holdsworth:
>
> > I was wondering if it would be a useful extension to Objective-C
> > expand the [] operator
> > to support array and hash references to NSArray and NSDictionary
> > classes directly to
> > greatly improve the readability of code:
>
> I'm not an ObjC front end maintainer and have no authority but one  
> issue
> I would have with this feature with gcc proper is that the ObjC front
> end would have to learn about the semantics of "NSArray" and
> "NSDictionary" which are actually not part of the language but part of
> an external library.
>
> Now gcc already supports the -fconstant-string-class option as one way
> to embed knowledge about an external library into an executable.   
> But I
> would like adding options with all these semantics from a foreign
> library into the language implementation.
>
> Maybe this could be done more elegantly with plugin infrastructure  
> that
> that es being currently added: http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/plugins
>
> Cheers,
> David