Question

I have this declaration in my header:

- (char*) randomCharGenerator;

And the method itself:

- (char*) randomCharGenerator {
    char *letter;
    return letter;
}

From what I read on the tutorial on CocoaDevCentral (http://cocoadevcentral.com/d/learn_objectivec/), I’m trying to call it like this:

char *tempLetter;
tempLetter = [char randomCharGenerator];

But I get the error: “Expected expression.” What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Where you have

tempLetter = [char randomCharGenerator];

you need to replace char with an instance of the class for which you defined the randomCharGenerater method.

This is because in this declaration:

- (char*) randomCharGenerator;

The - at the beginning denotes that randomCharGenerator is an instance method of whatever class it’s in, so it needs to be sent to an instance of your class. If you had replaced the - with a +, you would want to send the randomCharGenerator message to the class, as opposed to an instance of your class.

Note that char is a C data type, not an Objective-C class or object, so you can’t send it messages. So no expression of the form [char foo] is syntactically correct.