Re: bogus retain via NSEnumerator

[James Spencer]

In article <2c4a8c18.0404200922.526e6521@posting.google.com>, Wayne
Cochran <wcochran@acm.org> wrote:

> The Cocoa version of autorelease and the one documented in 
> the O'Reilly "Objective-C Pocket Reference" differ greatly.  I like the idea
> of autorelease sending a release message to the object as soon
> as the callee's stack frame is destroyed -- that makes a lot sense
> and is consistent with how local object's (i.e. stack
> allocated) are deallocated in C++.
> 
> This whole idea of autorelease pools seems a little strange to me and seems
> as error prone as performing my own explicit memory management.
> But I am new to Cocoa's memory management scheme, so the jury
> is still out.

You are comparing Apple's and oranges!  All (repeat: ALL) objects in
Objective C are dynamically allocated; none are allocated on the stack. 
Even in C++, dynamically allocated objects created with new are not
automatically destroyed just because a variable that REFERENCES the
object goes out of scope.

The autorelease mechanism works very well once you understand it.  The
advantage is that typically a method caller who gets a pointer to an
object back from the call doesn't have to do anything with it in terms
of retaining it or destroying it.   In C++, you would have to
explicitly destroy the reference.

Spence

-- 
James P. Spencer
Rochester, MN

"Badges??  We don't need no stinkin badges!"