Chris Petrilli is excited about some of the changes surfacing for Apple's evolution of Objective-C.

After having read the paper, I can't say I'm as excited. The beauty about Objective-C was its simple straightforwardness. It may be kind of an awkward syntax, but it's very quick and easy to explain.

Now we get properties. Sigh. I love "objects" with different kinds of instance variables. This was one of the biggest dissapointments I had with TweakUI and it's varied ways of having one object refer to another.

A syntactic sugar for what you can already do for enumerator macros. The macro system is straightforward and it works. Why not just provide a standard set of macros as part of the library toolkit? Why bolt on "special" tokens?

Fast IV access. That's always been there. That's OK I guess.

And oh, yay. Methods can have all kinds of "dressing" now. It's private. Or friendly. Or deprecated. Or unavailable. Gah.

The only good news is all the rumors that there will be some sort of GC support. Which will be interesting. Every Obj-C person I've ever bugged about it says things like "I'd NEVER use GC with obj-c. Over my dead body."

These are to be sure, not a huge change set. But what is interesting is that there's growing momentum to warp^H^H^H^Hevolve the defintion of Objective-c. What will be next? I'm getting so tired of these languages like Java where the "platform" changes every year or so, and twists into a whole new language. It was bad enough having to differentiate between FORTRAN IV and FORTRAN 77.