On May 22, 2008, at 10:43 AM, Greg Titus wrote:
On May 21, 2008, at 12:37 PM, Johnny Lundy wrote:
This is just one example of that "little tidbit" that is always
left out of these references by Apple. It seems to be the <.O. for
some reason. The "tidbit" isn't some extraneous bell or whistle;
it's always something fundamental.
They can't take 2 lines instead of 1 to document the behavior of a
class method?
A lot of people have already mentioned that the memory management
semantics for these methods are the same everywhere and are
described in the conceptual documentation. I'd like to answer the
obvious follow up question: even if it is described in the concept
docs, how would it hurt to repeat it in the NSArray class method
references? It is just one more line...
But it's not just one more line - it's like a dozen or so (to handle
the whole semantics of the memory management, not to mention the whole
GC vs no GC), and it would be the same dozen lines in hundreds of
different methods.
Even if you tried to shorten it up, say, to just make sure that it
"returns an autoreleased object" that would still require the reader
to understand what that means (so if you can shorten it up to just
that, why do you need it there at all? Alternately, if you need to
explain that the object is autoreleased, why don't you have to explain
what that means?). Worse, that isn't even accurate - you don't care
if the object is autoreleased or not (it may, for example, be a
singleton that is never actually released - for example [NSNumber
numberWithInt: 0] will return the same value every time you call it -
the result isn't autoreleased).
You need to understand what to do with regards to memory management in
the first place to be able to act appropriate to understand what it
means if the document says "returns an autoreleased object", and if
you understand the memory management, you don't need to know if it
returns an autorelased object or not. You understand the rules, and
then you know what you need to do with the object.
My experience when I first learned it was that I tended to try to over-
think the situation. Once I realized that it really was as simple as
it seemed, it all just clicked.
Glenn Andreas [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<http://www.gandreas.com/> wicked fun!
m.o.t.e.s. | minute object twisted environment simulation
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