Good practice for disambiguating argument names versus instance variable names in Objective-C

Question

I run into a fairly common scenario in Objective-C where I pass in a variable to an init method and then want to assign it to an instance variable of the same name. However

Answer 1

For setters (and by extension initializers), I believe the convention is to prefix the parameter name with new:

- (void)setCrunk:(Crunk *)newCrunk;
- (id)initWithCrunk:(Crunk *)newCrunk;

In general, I think the most common form I've seen is to call the parameter theCrunk, but Apple seems to recommend aCrunk.

Answer 2

And changing the name to "inValue" is not a good idea? What you have here - your 'solution' is complex, especially with the accessors, etc of Obj-C 2. Since self.value and inValue are different things, they need different names.

Note that you can use

-(void)method1:(NSString*)value; 

in the header

and

-(void)method1:(NSString*)inValue; 

in the .m file.

Answer 3

If you use only 1 the compiler will give you a warning.

You can combine 1 & 2 by using :

@synthesize value = _value;

If you want to hide your variable from the inheritors you can declare a empty named category and declare your property there.

For 3 you can use aValue for your argument.