Beginning Mac OS® X Programming

7.3. Methods

Now you are going to take a closer look at how methods are defined, and called, or invoked, to be more consistent with the OO terminology.

Consider the first method of the Person class above:

-(id)initWithName:(NSString *)name andAddress:(NSString *)address;

The method's name is broken into two segments, initWithName: and andAddress:. The full name of this method is initWithName:andAddress:, which is quite a mouthful, but has the advantage that it reads like a sentence. After each section of the name, there is a colon, which is actually considered part of the name itself, and then a parameter. The type of the parameter is given in parentheses, followed by the parameter name.

It is also legal to have parameters with only a colon, and no preceding label, like this:

-(void)methodWith3Parameters:(NSString *)param1 :(float)param2 :(int)param3;

The method name in this case is methodWith3Parameters:::—the colons are significant.

The parameter types in a method declaration are also optional, but if you exclude them, the parameter is assumed to be an object. A generic object has the type id in Objective-C, as shown in the following method declaration:

-(void)doSomethingWithObject:(id)object1 andObject:(id)object2;

This is an equivalent declaration:

-(void)doSomethingWithObject:object1 andObject:object2;

By now you will have realized that Objective-C methods also have return values, just like C functions. In the first example in this section, the return value was of the type ...