Technical term for accessing an array with an index and square brackets

Question

What is the term or name of the operation for getting member of an array? For example, this method returns a simple array:

- (NSArray*)createArray
{
    NSArray *myArray = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:@"unordentliches array", @"beliebiges Value", nil];
    return myArray;
}

And I can NSLog one of its elements in the following way:

NSLog(@"%@", [self createArray][1]);

Output:

beliebiges Value

Good, no problem here.

But what do we call this operation: [self createArray][1]? One that allows us to -- without first assigning the value to a NSString -- simply put this [1] right next to the the returned value from a method call and output the value?

[self createArray][1];

What is the technical term for this?

I wouldn't be 100% sure of what its called since I've never given it too much thought, but what you're doing there is creating a temporary object. The result of the function call [self createArray] is not stored, so the NSArray is temporary. Please correct me if I am wrong. — Alejandro, Jan 09 '14 at 20:22
You are just directly taking the return value of the function and using it. JQuery has chaining built into most of their calls. I don't know if that is the official term for that sort of thing. — 0xFADE, Jan 09 '14 at 20:30
@JoshCaswell Sorry, I didn't even know how to call this in order to search for a solution. And the search term "square-bracketed index after an Array" didn't not formulate / fabricate in my mind / imagination as well as it did for the other author linked. Thanks everyone for the time. — Unheilig, Jan 09 '14 at 20:31
No need to apologize; searching for terminology is indeed hard. — jscs, Jan 09 '14 at 20:31

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 09 '14 at 20:31

Putting the element index in parentheses (or brackets in this case) after an array is called “subscripting”. The index is called a “subscript”.

There is no special name for directly subscripting the array returned by a message without storing the array in a variable first.

Under the covers, the compiler turns the subscripting into another message, like this:

[[self createArray] objectAtIndexedSubscript:1];

Sending a message directly to the object returned by another message is called “message chaining” or “method chaining”.

Technical term for accessing an array with an index and square brackets

1 Answers1