Ayush's Blog

This post is inspired from the eye-opener article -> bignerdranch.

I always had this question, “Why does Objective-C need a BOOL when C gives it a free bool, which effectively works the same?”.

Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. BOOL and bool are entirely different beasts.

BOOL is a typedef, defined at /usr/include/objc/objc.h (Also available here)

typedef signed char	BOOL;

Similar to, Boolean, which is defined at /usr/include/MacTypes.h (Also available here)

typedef unsigned char Boolean;

Also, YES and NO are macros for 1 and 0. Reference

1
2
#define YES (BOOL)1
#define NO (BOOL)0

Where as bool is a defined type in C like int etc. It can have either true or false as value. It can have no other value. So, whenever you are writing a conditional statement, always try to use bool instead of any of the aforementioned options. This is required because comparisons like the one below can fail, even when you don’t expect it to. Example:

12 == YES

For more such examples, look at bignerdranch.

The thing to note is that, you should be careful about the same comparisons for Boolean too.