Objective-c – In Objective-C, given an id, how can I tell what type of object it points to

There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding the preprocessor.

What the compiler does when it sees a #include that it replaces that line with the contents of the included files, no questions asked.

So if you have a file a.h with this contents:

typedef int my_number;

and a file b.c with this content:

#include "a.h"
#include "a.h"

the file b.c will be translated by the preprocessor before compilation to

typedef int my_number;
typedef int my_number;

which will result in a compiler error, since the type my_number is defined twice. Even though the definition is the same this is not allowed by the C language.

Since a header often is used in more than one place include guards usually are used in C. This looks like this:

 #ifndef _a_h_included_
 #define _a_h_included_

 typedef int my_number;

 #endif

The file b.c still would have the whole contents of the header in it twice after being preprocessed. But the second instance would be ignored since the macro _a_h_included_ would already have been defined.

This works really well, but has two drawbacks. First of all the include guards have to be written, and the macro name has to be different in every header. And secondly the compiler has still to look for the header file and read it as often as it is included.

Objective-C has the #import preprocessor instruction (it also can be used for C and C++ code with some compilers and options). This does almost the same as #include, but it also notes internally which file has already been included. The #import line is only replaced by the contents of the named file for the first time it is encountered. Every time after that it is just ignored.

Three things are being declared here: an anonymous enumerated type is declared, ShapeType is being declared a typedef for that anonymous enumeration, and the three names kCircle, kRectangle, and kOblateSpheroid are being declared as integral constants.

Let's break that down. In the simplest case, an enumeration can be declared as

enum tagname { ... };

This declares an enumeration with the tag tagname. In C and Objective-C (but not C++), any references to this must be preceded with the enum keyword. For example:

enum tagname x;  // declare x of type 'enum tagname'
tagname x;  // ERROR in C/Objective-C, OK in C++

In order to avoid having to use the enum keyword everywhere, a typedef can be created:

enum tagname { ... };
typedef enum tagname tagname;  // declare 'tagname' as a typedef for 'enum tagname'

This can be simplified into one line:

typedef enum tagname { ... } tagname;  // declare both 'enum tagname' and 'tagname'

And finally, if we don't need to be able to use enum tagname with the enum keyword, we can make the enum anonymous and only declare it with the typedef name:

typedef enum { ... } tagname;

Now, in this case, we're declaring ShapeType to be a typedef'ed name of an anonymous enumeration. ShapeType is really just an integral type, and should only be used to declare variables which hold one of the values listed in the declaration (that is, one of kCircle, kRectangle, and kOblateSpheroid). You can assign a ShapeType variable another value by casting, though, so you have to be careful when reading enum values.

Finally, kCircle, kRectangle, and kOblateSpheroid are declared as integral constants in the global namespace. Since no specific values were specified, they get assigned to consecutive integers starting with 0, so kCircle is 0, kRectangle is 1, and kOblateSpheroid is 2.