The Objective-C Programming Language

Objective-C is a strict superset of ANSI C. C is a compiled, procedural programming language developed in the early 1970s at AT&T. Objective-C, which was developed by Brad J. Cox in the early 1980s, adds object-oriented features to C. It blends C language constructs with concepts that originated in Smalltalk-80.

Smalltalk is one of the earliest and best-known object-oriented languages. It was developed at Xerox PARC as a dynamically typed interactive language. Cox layered Smalltalk’s object and message passing system on top of standard C to create his new language. This approach allowed programmers to continue using familiar C-language development while accessing object-based features from within that language. In the late 1980s, Objective-C was adopted as the primary development language for the NeXTStep operating system by Steve Jobs’s startup computer company NeXT. NeXTStep became both the spiritual and literal ancestor of OS X.