Objective-C for Perl Hackers
I've been messing around with Objective-C off and on for a while now. Whenever I take a break and come back to it, I find myself having to look up some of the same syntax over and over. Some examples would be:
Perl:
$foo =~ s{bar}{baz}g;
Objective-C:
foo = [foo stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"bar" withString:@"baz"];
Perl:
$list{'foo'} = 'baz';
Objective-C:
[list setObject:baz forKey:@"foo"];
One thing in particular that gets me is the assigning a value to a dictionary, like in the example above. Naming the value *before* the key seems counter-intuitive to me. Luckily Xcode is great with autocompletion, which makes a lot of this easier, but I still find I need reference materials which are more Perlish. To make things easier for myself, I've set up a wiki to map Perl syntax to Objective-C where it makes sense.
Feel free to edit/update/correct the wiki where you see fit. I make no claims of expertise here, but I do find myself referring back to this list and adding to it as I write my own Objective-C code.
https://github.com/oalders/objective-c-for-perl-hackers/wiki.
I hack on MetaCPAN, CPAN modules and other fun stuff.
Thanks for this, very much appreciated!
Starting from january I am going to give myself a semester of c++ at school. So this comes quite timely for me. :-)
Objective-C is one of the few languages I have never actually used. . . but please tell me that
stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfStringis a joke and not a real method/function name from what I assume is a standard library?Seeing things like that makes me want to beat people over the head with their keyboards (specifically, people who come up with method/function/variable names like that).
I guess the idea is that it's supposed to read like English, but it ends up being verbose to the point that it's a bit off-putting. Trimming whitespace is another good example:
foo = [foo stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceCharacterSet]];
Concatenating a string, in particular, looks like total overkill:
fileName = [fileName stringByAppendingString:@".html"];
:)