Blocks are a powerful C-language feature that is part of Cocoa application development. They are similar to “closures” and “lambdas” you may find in scripting and programming languages such as Ruby, Python, and Lisp. Although the syntax and storage details of blocks might at first glance seem cryptic, you’ll find that it’s actually quite easy to incorporate blocks into your projects’ code.
Blocks are objects that encapsulate a unit of work—or, in less abstract terms, a segment of code—that can be executed at any time. They are essentially portable and anonymous functions that one can pass in as arguments of methods and functions or that can be returned from methods and functions. Blocks themselves have a typed argument list and may have inferred or declared returned type. You may also assign a block to a variable and then call it just as you would a function.