Reason to use ivars vs properties in objective c

Question

I have been unable to find any information on this topic and most of what I know about it has come by complete accident (and a few hours of trying to figure out why my code

Answer 1

You can just use @property and @synthesize without declaring the ivars, as you suggested. The problem above is that your @synthesize mapped the property name to a new ivar that is generated by the compiler. So, for all intents and purposes, your class definition is now:

@interface Test : NSObject {
int timesPlayed;
int highscore;
int _timesPlayed;
int _highscore;
}
...
@end

Assigning a value directly to the ivar timesPlayed will never show up if you access it via self.timesPlayed since you didn't modify the correct ivar.

You have several choices:

1 Remove the two ivars you declared in your original post and just let the @property / @synthesize dynamic duo do their thing.

2 Change your two ivars to be prefixed by an underscore '_'

3 Change your @synthesize statements to be:

@implemenation Test
@synthesize timesPlayed;
@synthesize highscore;

...