[Doing it Wrong] Auto Boxing of primitives

Question

I can't seem to figure out how to get Objective-c to auto box my primitives.

I assumed that i would be able to do the following

float foo = 12.5f;
NSNumber* bar;

bar = foo;

However i find that i have used to the more verbose method of

float foo = 12.5f;
NSNumber* bar;

bar = [NSNumber numberWithFloat:foo];

Am i doing it wrong or is this as good as it gets?

Answer 1

This is as good as is gets.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, Objective-C does not do auto-boxing or unboxing of primitive types to NSNumber. When put that way, it may be clear why: Objective-C has no concept of NSNumber, a class in the Cocoa Foundation framework. As a small superset of C, Objective-C doesn't have a "native" numeric object type--just the native C types.