macOS Ruby-style Class Constants?

[jardeon]

Hi everyone,

As a recent arrival on the Obj-C scene, I'm still wrestling with a few concepts.

Does Objective C provide a similar functionality to Ruby's class constants?

In Ruby, I could do the following:

class PolygonShape
  attr_accessor :number_of_sides
  NAMES = { "3" => "triangle", "4" => "tetragon", "5" => "pentagon" }
  
  def name
    NAMES[self.number_of_sides]
  end
end

I'd like to do something similar in Obj-C, define an NSDictionary of terms that's constant to the class, and not have to re-instantiate it on each run. Currently, I'm doing the following:

- (NSDictionary *)names {
	NSDictionary *names = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:@"triangle", @"3", @"tetragon", @"4",  
								   @"pentagon", @"5",  nil];	
	return names;
}

- (NSString *)name {
	
	NSString *polygon_name = [[self names] objectForKey:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", [self numberOfSides]]];
	return polygon_name;
}

Thanks!