What does -> mean?

Question

I\'m a relative newbie to Objective-C (only studied Arron Hillegras\'s book) and am confused by the following snippit of code I\'ve found in one of Apple\'s code examples, i

Answer 1

You use -> when you want to access an ivar. Like C structures you will use a . or -> (in pointers to structs) in Objective-C objects you can use -> but is not necessary since you can access them directly.

Hence:

self->_numbers = [numbers copy];

and

_numbers = [numbers copy];

are the same

You want to use -> when you want to access that ivar explicitly.

Be aware that in Objective-C you can use . but only when its a property. You can use -> regardless that.