Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Using accessors

You have a perfectly good initializer for BNRAppliance, but let’s take a moment to look at a variation that you will see in other people’s code. We typically do a plain assignments in an initializer, but many programmers will use the accessor methods. Change initWithProductName: to do this:

- (instancetype)initWithProductName:(NSString *)pn
{
    // Call NSObject's init method
   self = [super init];

    // Did it return something non-nil?
    if (self) {

        // Set the product name
        [self setProductName:pn];

        // Give voltage a starting value
        [self setVoltage:120];
    }
    return self;
}

In most cases, there is little reason to do one over the other, but it makes for a great argument. The argument goes like this: The assign guy says, “You cannot ...