On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 1:45 PM, Chris Koerner <[email protected]> wrote:

> Just curious, under what circumstances in ANY language do you use an
> underscore in front of a variable/method/object?
>
>
I've never been a fan of underscore prefixes, but I have recently adopted
them when working in Objective-C. If I wanted to have an ivar foo, the
convention is to have the property that access that ivar be foo/setFoo:.
While I *could* have both an ivar called foo and a property called foo, it's
a little confusing. For example,

   self.foo = 23;
   foo = 23;

Those are not the same thing. The first is using the property, while the
second is directly accessing the ivar. So now I define ivars as @private and
with a leading underscore to make it very explicit if I'm accessing the ivar
directly.

Joey



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