Copyright ã1995 by NeXT Computer, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

Introduction

NeXTSTEPäProgramming Interface Summary provides the syntax of all programming elements in the NeXTSTEP environment.  It's intended to be used as a quick reference companion to the NeXTSTEP General Reference; everything that's described in the General Reference is summarized here.

The organization of this manual parallels that of NeXTSTEP General Reference.  It starts with the root class: the Object class that is at the root of the inheritance tree of NeXTSTEP classes.  Each of the specialized kits has a chapter to itself, including Application Kitä, Database Kitä, Indexing Kitä, Mach Kitä, NetInfo Kitä, and 3D Graphics Kitä.  Three chapters deal with the programmatic interface to NeXT applications: Interface Builderä, Workspace Managerä, and Preferences.  Three chapters treat topics that are not considered to be kits: sound, video, and MIDI.  Five chapters are devoted to general facilities: the common classes and functions, Display PostScriptâ, the run-time system, distributed objects, and functions that invoke the Mach operating system.

The Foundation KitäÐwhich is not described hereÐdefines a base layer of classes that is OpenStep compliant. OpenStep is an operating system independent, object-oriented application layer, based on NeXT's object technology, and Foundation is NeXT's first OpenStep offering. Foundation provides its own primitive class, NSObject, capabilities similar to the Common classes (List, Hash, Storage, and so on), and other features that improve the object-oriented development process. For more information, see the Foundation Reference in /NextLibrary/Documentation/NextDev/Foundation.

This book is part of a collection of manuals called the NeXTSTEP Developer's Library.

Syntax Notation

In these summaries, bold and italic have the following significance:

·	Bold denotes a word or character that is to be taken literally (typed as it appears).

·	Italic denotes a placeholder for an elementÐtypically an argument nameÐthat you supply.