Objective-C Property Access

Question

What is the difference in accessing an objects properties or methods via foo.property to [foo property]?

Answer 1

Nothing! Dot-notation is "syntactic sugar" introduced in Objective-C 2.0. In fact, the compiler converts foo.property to [foo property] during compile-time, so they compile to exactly the same thing.

It's simply a matter of which you prefer.

Answer 2

At compile time they're treated the same, but one benefit of using dot notation to handle properties is that while coding, after placing the "." code completion/code window will only show valid properties as suggestions whereas using brackets will show all methods.