Comment Re:For the better? (Score 1) 345
Now calling it a "poor man's Smalltalk", well, you might have a point there.
and
But even the other thing you mention, operator overloading... that is absent for a reason, simply because software design works differently in ObjC. You don't really need it in the same way that you do with C++.
In other words, you don't even know Smalltalk, but speculate about the similarity between ObjC and Smalltalk. For your information, Smalltalk has operator overloading (in the form of the unary and binary selectors) and uses it in the implementation for numbers. It works a bit differently (all binary operators have same precedence, so 5 + 4 * 3 = 17, but 4 * 3 + 5 = 32, I hope I didn't mix up the sequence, I am rather sure that binary selectors evaluated right to left), but it definitely has them. Also the big plus (and minus) for Smalltalk always was the integrated environment, you can literally change anything, if you want for example the compiler on the fly. It is similar to Lisp in that regard (though I think Lisp does it more elegantly). ObjC is a very, very distant cousin, basically only inheriting the compound selectors. And as I just found out, ObjC finally has inherited the BlockContexts, after only 20 years (or 30, I couldn't find out when they made it into ObjC exactly, Smalltalk had them fixed at least since 1980) that are a central part of Smalltalk. In Smalltalk there never was any kind of selection or looping statements, they were implemented as methods on objects taking blocks. E.g.:
|i|
i
That defines a local variable i, assigns 0 to it and then tests if it is 1 and executes the first block returning a string if it is, else it returns the result of second block.