Right, it won't cause a crash -- just unpredictable results. My point was more that dot syntax doesn't always equate to easier coding;

In this particular case though, who would be playing with the CALayer class without ever having touched the documentation? The overview of view geometry (frame, anchor point, bounds, position) is second only after the Core Animation introduction in the docs. And it's pretty clear: when you get a frame from a layer, it is an implicit function of the anchor point, position and bounds -- but the frame itself is not stored (when you set it).

So, if you're using dot syntax to store properties throughout your code, and then you use it on the frame property, a casual reading of the code might lead someone to think that you could retrieve that value later and have it be the same.

(Here's what Joe Conway says about the dot-notation syntax: http://weblog.bignerdranch.com/?p=83 )

>> who would be playing with the CALayer class without ever having touched the documentation?

How many hackers out there always read the entire manual before playing around? I'd wager most.

I agree that Objective-C is slightly schizophrenic about the dot-syntax, but I would argue that dot-syntax for getters and setters is easier for a newcomers to learn.

I'm not saying one has to read the manual before playing around, but some things are simply not explorable with at least a little bit of introduction. You had to read somewhere that [NSObject alloc]init] was how to create a new object; you didn't just guess at it. Similarly, how far would someone get creating a CALayer, and adding it to a view without ever looking at the docs?

If someone is having a hard time learning Objective-C, maybe the real suggestion is to start by reading at least a bit of the manual.