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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T23:10:52+00:00

I come from a C# background and I am learning Objective-C. I was wondering

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I come from a C# background and I am learning Objective-C. I was wondering if I could get some clarification on syntax. Thanks in advance for your help.

What is the difference between the lines of code shown below? Given that I know for sure that the type in the “tempItem” dictionary is an (NSString *) type and newsItem.pictureUrl is also an (NSString *):

Scenario 1:

newsItem.pictureUrl = [tempItem objectForKey:@"picture"];

Scenario 2:

newsItem.pictureUrl = (NSString *)[tempItem objectForKey:@"picture"];
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I know what you mean. I also started out preferring to cast, since it clearly shows what you are doing. But after a while, it gets terribly tedious and you learn to omit it.

    The fact that there are no generics, and that the containers only store objects, is a bit of a bummer, especially if you come from a language with generics. It means you are constantly and explicitly converting between objects and simple types (e.g. between NSNumber and int) and that there is no way, except to query [object class], to ensure you only get an NSString or an exception you can handle.

    But the cast will not make any difference. If the object returned is not an NSString, and you cast it to one, it will make no difference. The cast does no implicit type checking, nor a conversion. It merely reinterprets the return value.

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