In programming, what differentiates a good developer from a great developer is the way each one takes advantage of the programming tools he or she offered by the used language. Objective-C, the official language for developing applications for iPhone, iPad and Mac OS, is a multi-featured one, and as a relative to C, very powerful. New developers have a lot to explore when starting working with it, while advanced programmers have always something new to learn, as there are numerous supported programming aspects. One of them, is the capability to write code using Blocks.
Blocks do not consist of a new programming discovery in Objective-C. They exist in other programming languages too (such as Javascript) with other names, such as Closures. In iOS, they first-appeared in version 4.0, and since then they’ve known great acceptance and usage. In subsequent iOS versions, Apple re-wrote or updated many framework methods so they adopt blocks, and it seems that blocks are going to be partly the future of the way code is written. But what are they all about really?
Well, a block is a self-contained, autonomous code fragment, existing always into the scope of another programming structure, as for example the body of a method. The code on the block can “interact” with the world out of it, but what takes place in the block is not visible to the scope out of it. Also, blocks can modify the values of variables being out of its body using a special way (we’ll see more later). Blocks have two great features:
- They can be executed in a later time, and not when the code of the scope they have been implemented is being executed.
- Their usage leads eventually to a much cleaner and tidier code writing, as they can be used instead of delegate methods, written just in one place and not spread to many files.