Inside Macintosh: Cyberdog Programmer's Kit /

Preface - About The Programmer's Kit

Formatting Conventions

This book uses various conventions to present certain types of information.

Special Fonts

All code listings, reserved words, and names of data structures,
constants, fields, parameters, and functions are shown in Letter Gothic
(this is Letter Gothic).

Types of Notes

There are several types of notes used in this book.

Note

A note formatted like this contains information that is interesting but possibly not essential to an understanding of the main text.

IMPORTANT

A note like this contains information that is especially important.

Code Presentation

Prototypes for methods of Cyberdog classes are in the System Object Model (SOM) Interface Definition Language (IDL). As an example of what IDL prototypes look like, here is the prototype for the SetCyberItem method:

void SetCyberItem (in CyberItem item, in ParameterSet openParams);

In IDL method declarations, each parameter declaration is preceded by a directional attribute ("in", "out", or "inout") that denotes whether the parameter is used as an input, or as a result, or as both.

Listings of implementation code are in C++. In implementation listings, note that every call to a method of a SOM-based class (as all Cyberdog classes are) includes an extra parameter, the environment parameter (ev), that does not appear in the method's IDL prototype. Here is an example (in C++) of a call to the SetCyberItem method: