..outside the safety of Cocoa, there isn't even a standard way to ask an object what class it is or what selectors is responds to. Yes, there is. The Objective

..outside the safety of Cocoa, there isn't even a standard way to ask an object what class it is or what selectors is responds to. Yes, there is. The Objective-C run time lets you do all of this. It is in C and not Objective-C. But, NSObject is barely more than a thin wrapper for these functions, anyway.