I often use single vendor credit card numbers for my online transactions because in the event of a breach or theft, the numbers cannot be used elsewhere. Many credit card companies offer these under other names, such as Discover who calls these “Secure Online Account Numbers.” These work really well, except for the fact that these do not work well with Amazon purchases. There are a few other cases they fail, but Amazon is the biggest nuisance for me.
What Objective-C Has Learned
In a few of my recent posts, I outlined some things which I believe that Objective-C can learn from Java, the most recent discussing error handling. In order to avoid the impression that I may not like Objective-C, I figured I should outline some of what I believe are the most important improvements Objective-C has made.
Properties
When properties were first introduced, I read several who described them as simply syntax sugar. While they didn’t initially add much of anything that couldn’t already be done in the language before, they did yield one important feature: generated code. The code necessary in a setter, in particular the releasing of a previous value and setting the new value, was often fraught with errors. Despite code examples on a proper setter from Apple, I saw several cases where a setter failed to release the previous value, or retain the new value, or more commonly, do those two in the correct order. Enabling the compiler to generate this code for the programmer removed many of these errors.