Objective-C Language Basic Data Types BOOL

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Example

The BOOL type is used for boolean values in Objective-C. It has two values, YES, and NO, in contrast to the more common "true" and "false".

Its behavior is straightforward and identical to the C language's.

BOOL areEqual = (1 == 1);    // areEqual is YES
BOOL areNotEqual = !areEqual    // areNotEqual is NO
NSCAssert(areEqual, "Mathematics is a lie");    // Assertion passes

BOOL shouldFlatterReader = YES;
if (shouldFlatterReader) {
    NSLog(@"Only the very smartest programmers read this kind of material.");
}

A BOOL is a primitive, and so it cannot be stored directly in a Foundation collection. It must be wrapped in an NSNumber. Clang provides special syntax for this:

NSNumber * yes = @YES;    // Equivalent to [NSNumber numberWithBool:YES]
NSNumber * no = @NO;    // Equivalent to [NSNumber numberWithBool:NO]

The BOOL implementation is directly based on C's, in that it is a typedef of the C99 standard type bool. The YES and NO values are defined to __objc_yes and __objc_no, respectively. These special values are compiler builtins introduced by Clang, which are translated to (BOOL)1 and (BOOL)0. If they are not available, YES and NO are defined directly as the cast-integer form. The definitions are found in the Objective-C runtime header objc.h



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