To assist the runtime system, the compiler encodes the return and argument types for each method in a character string and associates the string with the method selector. The coding scheme it uses is also useful in other contexts and so is made publicly available with the @encode() compiler directive. When given a type specification, @encode() returns a string encoding that type. The type can be a basic type such as an int, a pointer, a tagged structure or union, or a class name—any type, in fact, that can be used as an argument to the C sizeof() operator.