[nomurrcy]

A lot of developers (myself included) don't use the dot syntax for property access for this reason and another:

x.foo = z; becomes an ambiguous statement in obj-c when you use dot access. Is x an object? then this is a message send. Is x a struct? then this is an assignment.

Typically in my interface file, I explicitly define my member variables with a leading '_';

@interface Foo { NSObject_bar; }

@property(nonatomic, retain) NSObject bar;

@implementation Foo @synthesize bar=_bar; @end

And if I want to access bar I use [x bar], [x setBar:y]; it is easy to visually scan for direct use of member values by looking for the leading '_'