Objective-C

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What Does Objective-C Mean?

Objective-C (ObjC) is a programming language that is used in the OS X and iOS operating systems and their application programming interfaces (APIs). Objective-C is object oriented, general purpose and adds to new language features in the C programming language. Originally developed in the 1980s, Objective-C was used by some of the earliest operating systems.

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Techopedia Explains Objective-C

Originally created by Brad Cox and Tom Love at their company Stepstone, the Objective-C programming language gained popularity with its use in NeXT computers. The language was soon linked with Smalltalk in order to expand the usability of both the languages. Objective-C programs that are generic and do not use external complex libraries can be complied in any system compatible with GCC or Clang. Extensions used for Objective-C source code are .m while header files are similar to C programming header files, meaning the .h extension. Objective C++ files have a file extension of .mm for their source code files.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.