On 13-Apr-08, at 12:02 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
why is it necessary to set the variable appointments (for instance)
to nil
in this example? Should we do this for each variable? When have we
to do
this?
IMO, it's totally unnecessary. Seems to be a cargo culting thing more
than anything else.
No, I can personally assure you that exact practice has led me to
finding many dozens -- quite possibly several hundreds by now actually
-- of 'calling methods of a deleted object' type bugs in C++ code,
particularly game code I port from Windows, which somehow always seems
to have been written by semi-literate chimpanzees on crack. And
perhaps I am unfair to the chimpanzees here.
It does seem that class of problem is much less likely to arise with
Objective-C object references (I'm still fairly new to this Cocoa
thing) but as long as I still work with any C++ objects or raw
pointers, I'm going to consider that "set things up so anything
accessing this object's memory after I'm done with it promptly causes
an access violation" is a valuable habit -- nay, essential practice --
in properly defensive programming. Autoptrs and the like help, but
they're not foolproof. Stands to reason that the retain/[auto]release
paradigm isn't completely foolproof either, although it does seem
pretty resistant to commonly accepted levels of foolery so far.
--
Alex Curylo -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://www.alexcurylo.com/
There are two great secrets to success in life.
The first is to not tell everything you know.
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