Dot notation vs. message notation for declared pro

Question

We now have the "dot" notation for properties. I've seen various back and forths about the merits of dot notation vs. message notation. To keep the responses untainted I'm not going to respond either way in the question.

What is your thought about dot notation vs. message notation for property accessing?

Please try to keep it focused on Objective-C - my one bias I'll put forth is that Objective-C is Objective-C, so your preference that it be like Java or JavaScript aren't valid.

Valid commentary is to do with technical issues (operation ordering, cast precedence, performance, etc), clarity (structure vs. object nature, both pro and con!), succinctness, etc.

Note, I'm of the school of rigorous quality and readability in code having worked on huge projects where code convention and quality is paramount (the write once read a thousand times paradigm).

Answer 1

I've mostly been raised in the Objective-C 2.0 age, and I prefer the dot notation. To me, it allows the simplification of code, instead of having extra brackets, I can just use a dot.

I also like the dot syntax because it makes me really feel like I'm accessing a property of the object, instead of just sending it a message (of course the dot-syntax really does translate into message sending, but for the sake of appearances, the dot feels different). Instead of "calling a getter" by the old syntax, it really feels like I'm directly getting something useful from the object.

Some of the debate around this is concerned with "But we already have dot-syntax, and it's for structs!". And that's true. But (and again, this is just psychological) it basically feels the same to me. Accessing a property of an object using dot-syntax feels the same as accessing a member of a struct, which is more or less the intended effect (in my opinion).

****Edit: As bbum pointed out, you can also use dot-syntax for calling any method on an object (I was unaware of this). So I will say my opinion on dot-syntax is only for dealing with properties of an object, not everyday message sending**