Re: NSMenuItem and NSValidatedUserInterfaceItem

[David Chisnall]

On 6 Jan 2009, at 11:06, Fred Kiefer wrote:

> To be honest, I don't see any potential use for the protocol itself.  
> We
> need to have an abstraction for the menu representation, but this is
> already there. Why would anybody use menu items that aren't of a
> subclass of NSMenuItem?

This is Objective-C, not C++.  Types are just there as a hint to help  
static error checking - there is nothing stopping you passing  
something that isn't an NSMenuItem, but acts like one, to something  
that expects an NSMenuItem.  My recommendation would be to track the  
Apple changes, since it makes porting from Cocoa easier, and because  
it makes for people who use the Apple docs as a reference (e.g. me).

If we want to use something that isn't an NSMenuItem in future, we  
just need an explicit cast and to make sure we implement all of the  
public methods of NSMenuItem (which we'd need to do anyway with the  
protocol).

David