Objective C is not forced to have such design; if you don't import Foundation you can use plain libobjc and create your own root class, you can name methods how

Objective C is not forced to have such design; if you don't import Foundation you can use plain libobjc and create your own root class, you can name methods however you want. Objective C historically boiled down to basically a preprocessor that transformed its Smalltalk-like additions to C to calls to objc_* functions and C structures. In the years, Apple has added syntax to interface with their own classes (i.e. @autorelease that AFAIK interfaces with NSAutoreleasePool), but that's about it.