C's a great language in 1985, and a great starting point. But development of UI software is one of those areas where object oriented software really shines. What if we could get all the advantages of C as a procedural language, but graft on top an extremely lightweight object system with a spec of < 20 pages to take advantage of these new 1980s-era developments in software engineering, while keeping 100% of the maturity and performance of the C ecosystem? We could call it Objective-C.

And Objective-C is C. A strict superset, in fact.

If

   [aView display];

really, really, really isn't to your liking, you can write

   objc_msgSend( aView, @selector(display)); 

or even:

   objc_msgSend( aView, sel_registerName("display"));

That's pretty much all there is to it. But I have to admit I like the syntax better:

   [aView display];

(Hi mpw)

(Hi Adam, how's the flying?)