Decide: "Objective-C" or "Objective C"?

Decide: "Objective-C" or "Objective C"?

[Michael Snyder]

Hello Jim, Klee, 

We just got a submission of apple's gdb support for objective c 
from Adam Fedor at GNU.  I was hoping you could supply us with
a little history, author's names etc, to go into the changelog.

Also, first question: Should the name of the language (in comments
etc.) be "Objective-C", or "Objective C" (hyphen or no)?

Thanks,
Michael

Re: Decide: "Objective-C" or "Objective C"?

[David Carlton]

On Wed, 18 Sep 2002 13:07:16 -0700, Michael Snyder <msnyder@redhat.com> said:

> Also, first question: Should the name of the language (in comments
> etc.) be "Objective-C", or "Objective C" (hyphen or no)?

I'm not whom you've addressed this to, but I wanted to throw in my
grammatical two cents.

I assume the language is named Objective C rather than Objective-C; if
not, it should be.

But: if the words are being used as an adjective, I'm pretty sure you
should write it as Objective-C.

So, for example, "The Objective-C compiler compiles the programming
language named 'Objective C'."  (Whereas "The objective C compiler
compiles code written the C programming language just as it's supposed
to, even if the code in question was written by its dearest friend.")

But, of course, that's just my opinion; if actual practice is
consistently different from the above then obviously you should go
with actual practice.  And my opinion might even be wrong about the
grammatical niceties, even aside from actual practice.

David Carlton
carlton@math.stanford.edu

Re: Decide: "Objective-C" or "Objective C"?

[Klee Dienes]

All documentation I've ever seen (the original NeXT documents, the 
current Apple documentation, and the majority of FSF documentation) 
refer to it as "Objective-C" (with the hyphen).  One could argue that 
it should be otherwise, but my inclination would be to just treat it as 
a proper name and move on to more interesting issues.

As far as history goes, the majority of the Objective-C support was in 
place by the time I started working on GDB at Apple.  I did a fair bit 
of hacking on the Objective-C code when I re-ported GDB to NeXT/Apple 
based on the 4.16 sources in 1999.  Jim Ingham and I have been doing 
bugfixes on it since then, but we haven't really had to change it 
overly much.  To be honest, it was my understanding that you had 
written a large portion of it; I fear that any previous authors may be 
lost in the depths of time.  I'll do a bit of archaeology and see what 
I can dig up.

I'm really excited to see someone working to get the changes accepted 
into the mainline sources; I've taken a quick look, and they look like 
a great distillation of the Obj-C work.  We'd be thrilled to see them 
accepted; they'd help our merge work considerably.  I'm merging Adam's 
patches into our current sources now to make sure they match as much as 
possible; I'll put up a new GDB tarball for reference as soon as I'm 
done.


On Wednesday, September 18, 2002, at 04:07 PM, Michael Snyder wrote:

>
> Hello Jim, Klee,
>
> We just got a submission of apple's gdb support for objective c
> from Adam Fedor at GNU.  I was hoping you could supply us with
> a little history, author's names etc, to go into the changelog.
>
> Also, first question: Should the name of the language (in comments
> etc.) be "Objective-C", or "Objective C" (hyphen or no)?
>
> Thanks,
> Michael

Re: Decide: "Objective-C" or "Objective C"?

[Michael Snyder]

Klee Dienes wrote:
> 
> All documentation I've ever seen (the original NeXT documents, the
> current Apple documentation, and the majority of FSF documentation)
> refer to it as "Objective-C" (with the hyphen).  One could argue that
> it should be otherwise, but my inclination would be to just treat it as
> a proper name and move on to more interesting issues.
> 
> As far as history goes, the majority of the Objective-C support was in
> place by the time I started working on GDB at Apple.  I did a fair bit
> of hacking on the Objective-C code when I re-ported GDB to NeXT/Apple
> based on the 4.16 sources in 1999.  Jim Ingham and I have been doing
> bugfixes on it since then, but we haven't really had to change it
> overly much.  To be honest, it was my understanding that you had
> written a large portion of it; I fear that any previous authors may be
> lost in the depths of time.  I'll do a bit of archaeology and see what
> I can dig up.
> 
> I'm really excited to see someone working to get the changes accepted
> into the mainline sources; I've taken a quick look, and they look like
> a great distillation of the Obj-C work.  We'd be thrilled to see them
> accepted; they'd help our merge work considerably.  I'm merging Adam's
> patches into our current sources now to make sure they match as much as
> possible; I'll put up a new GDB tarball for reference as soon as I'm
> done.


OK!  I'll clean up the varying usages of "Objective[ -]C".
So, six years later, I finally get to check this stuff in!
;-)

Michael

Re: Decide: "Objective-C" or "Objective C"?

[John Marshall]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 01:07:16PM -0700, Michael Snyder wrote:
> Also, first question: Should the name of the language (in comments
> etc.) be "Objective-C", or "Objective C" (hyphen or no)?

The GCC web pages' codingconventions.html has a ruling on this: *with*
the hyphen.  Presumably there's a GCC mailing list thread from the time
of its addition to codingconventions.html with the reasoning.

    John