I'm a C and C++ programmer trying to get started with Objective-C. I'm really bewildered, though, by the apparent total absence of a standards document for the language and standard library. I can understand that there's no ISO standard, but is there no reference document *at all?* And how is it that nobody seems very concerned about this state of affairs? (Admittedly, it's hard to Google for such a thing, because "reference", "document", and "standard" are all overloaded terms. So it's possible that I've just missed something critical.)

This question gets close to asking the same thing: [Where can i find a document explaining how Objective-C is implemented](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1363589/where-can-i-find-a-document-explaining-how-objective-c-is-implemented) and the only answer provided was "read this source code published by Apple which is pretty close to what their implementation did a few years ago, maybe".

This page: <http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ObjectiveCLiterals.html> includes a snippet of a formal grammar for Objective-C, but ironically it's in the context of describing a feature that Clang just went off and added on their own and that nobody else supports. There's another grammar here: <http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/macosx-dev/2001-March/022979.html> but it's more than 10 years old.

To narrow the question down to the barest minimum: I'd like to know what methods are guaranteed to be provided by "Object", and what the behavior of each method is. For other languages, this type of information is usually provided by something like this: <http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/Object.html>