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Foundation Kit

Introduction

The Foundation Kit defines a base layer of Objective C classes for OpenStep.  In addition to providing a set of useful primitive object classes, it introduces several paradigms that define functionality not covered by the Objective C language.  The Foundation Kit is designed with these goals in mind:

·	To provide a set of basic utility classes

·	To make software development easier by introducing consistent conventions for things such as deallocation

·	To support Unicode strings, object persistence, and object distribution

·	To provide a level of operating system independence, enhancing application portability

Classes

The Foundation Kit includes the root class for almost all OpenStep classes, classes representing basic data types such as strings and byte arrays, collections of other objects, and classes representing system information such as dates. The following diagram shows the inheritance relationship among these classes. After the diagram, the specifications for these classes are arranged in alphabetical order.

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Figure 2-1.  Foundation Kit Classes