Use of properties for primitive types

Question

I\'m having trouble understanding when to use properties in Objective C 2.0. It seems you do not need a property for a primitive type such as: int, bool, float. Is this true

Answer 1

Yes, you should declare a property for primitive types. The only real difference is you should use assign (which is the default, so you can also leave it out) instead of copy or retain. I can't speak for the rest of the example, but it's probably accessing the internal instance variable directly, or if it's being accessed from another class key value coding is generating an accessor (which is really bad form). I'm guessing it's the former; if I don't need a special accessor and the instance variable isn't used outside the class I'll just refer to it directly rather than declaring a property. Some people might argue against that I suppose, but it seems a little excessive to me.