Why do we have to do [MyClass class] in Objective-C?

Question

In Objective-C, you can invoke class methods with:

[MyClass aClassMethod];

And you can query an instance\'s kind with:

[som         


        

Answer 1

@John and @ryanprayogo -- you are both fundamentally wrong. MyClass is a Class, which is also an object, but does not inherit from NSObject. Objective-C is kind of weird this way, but its actually brilliant when fully explained (See here). The answer here, though, is as @yehnan said, that a class name can be either a type name for declarators and casts, or as a receiver for messages. The implementation of [MyClass class] returns self (which is, within the method, MyClass). Also as @yehnan said, the language could support passing it as an argument, although it simply doesn't.