Open Radar

 
There are times when I want to make little data structure objects (often for intermediate use) to hold some kind of state or whatnot. Often I end up just using a dictionary - and while there's nothing terribly wrong with that, it's sometimes annoying to give up the type-checking, auto-completion, and other benefits of a real object with real properties. I'm wondering if there could be a middle ground that isn't so syntactically heavy as a "real" class but still gets the job done.

My suggestion is a simple syntactic sugar for creating property-only classes modeled a bit after C's structs. Here's a short example using the current syntax (with ARC) vs. my proposed @record syntax to accomplish the same thing more compactly:


@interface RangeRect : NSObject
@property (assign) CGRect rect;
@property (assign) NSRange range;
@property (copy) NSString *text;
@end

@implementation RangeRect
@synthesize rect, range, text;
@end



@record RangeRect : NSObject
    (assign) CGRect rect;
    (assign) NSRange range;
    (copy)   NSString *text;
@end

I think this would make the task of using small, internal data structures in Objective-C a bit nicer. @record would just create a normal class internally, so nothing too deep would be expected to change - this would just primarily be sugar. Although I could imagine expanding on this so that the scope of the generated classes could somehow be controlled so you could, for example, define a named @record in one implementation and in another implementation, you could define a different @record with the same name that's only used internally without them conflicting.