Question

I’ve seen this operator pop up quite a few times in example code in “Learn Objective C on the Mac.”

I believe it’s an operator in the C language which Objective C inherits.
I tried Googling and searching Stack Overflow and oddly nothing came up.

Does it have an English name?

Answer 1

It has to do with structures.

When we have a struct available locally on the stack, we access its members with the . operator. For example:

CGPoint p = CGPointMake(42,42);
NSLog(@"%f", p.x);

However, if we instead have a pointer to a structure, we have to use the -> operator:

CGPoint *p = malloc(1*sizeof(CGPoint));
p->x = 42.0f;
NSLog(@"%f", p->x);
free(p);