Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!src.honeywell.com!msi.umn.edu!noc.MR.NET!gacvx2.gac.edu!scott From: scott@mcs-server.gac.edu (Scott Hess) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Objective C class libraries Message-ID: Date: 3 Dec 90 18:10:01 GMT References: <1990Dec3.145326.18906@noose.ecn.purdue.edu> <9676@darkstar.ucsc.edu> Organization: Gustavus Adolphus College Lines: 37 Nntp-Posting-Host: mcs-server.gac.edu In-reply-to: isbell@ucscf.UCSC.EDU's message of 3 Dec 90 16:24:34 GMTLines: 37 In article <9676@darkstar.ucsc.edu> isbell@ucscf.UCSC.EDU (Art Isbell) writes: For those of you who are NeXT developers, have you found the Objective C classes provided by NeXT to be sufficient? Because reusability of code is supposed to be a feature of object oriented design, have you found that purchasing/obtaining classes defined by others (Stepstone, etc.) has been beneficial as opposed to your reinventing someone else's wheel? I would be interested in your experiences and recommendations. I once started a post of the Stepstone Foundation Library (actually, reverse engineering it from their documentation, as we don't have it anywhere, here), and actually got quite far. I stopped, though, when I realized that most of the stuff is supplied in some form or another by NeXT's ObjC class library. Most of the array and collection stuff is handled by List and Storage, Set by HashTable. All you miss are Point, Rect, and String. I'll admit that the NeXT stuff is not so flexible . . . But, the reason I don't care is because I also realized that in many of these cases, the C end of the deal was much more natural than Objective-C. I found my String class simply wasn't really more useful than the use of the string library, and it limited from doing stuff which I liked to do (which would probably be the positive side :-). Also, since there's no garbage collection, it really didn't give you a whole lot (since you still had to make sure things were allocated/freed, and the like - though the Objective-C-iffied versions looked nicer). One thing that we are lacking on the NeXT is time. Given time, I would bet there will be more class libraries. Right now, though, there's not been the time for people to end up with a decent class that they think the net might like to use and modify, so no one has really done it. -- scott hess scott@gac.edu Independent NeXT Developer (Stuart) GAC Undergrad (Horrid. Simply Horrid. I mean the work!)