Look up Smalltalk for some hints. I'm not an expert on Obj-C or Smalltalk but Obj-C borrowed pretty heavily in some respects, as I understand it. It is object-o

Look up Smalltalk for some hints. I'm not an expert on Obj-C or Smalltalk but Obj-C borrowed pretty heavily in some respects, as I understand it. It is object-oriented, but it is a substantially different paradigm from the C++/Java family. As another hint, Ruby was pretty heavily influenced by Smalltalk as well. Think about stuff like responds_to? and whatnot, where you're sending messages to objects and objects can actually intercept and react to those messages. The comparison to C++ is pretty illustrative, if only as a point of contrast; C++ is certainly not the only possible approach to OO in a C-like language. Alan Kay, the guy who did Smalltalk and OO, doesn't particularly approve of the C++ approach to OO. In practical terms, though, I think it's somewhat historical, to the extent that any programming language's usage is or is not historical. :)