Re: Problem with NSMutableDictionary
Re: Problem with NSMutableDictionary
- Subject: Re: Problem with NSMutableDictionary
- From: Peter Duniho <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 10:27:17 -0700
Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 00:38:31 -0700
From: mmalc crawford <email@hidden>
These rules are fundamental to effective Cocoa programming, and
should not need to be repeated throughout the documentation. Adding
reminders throughout would require a huge effort and simply add
unnecessary bulk to the reference.
Well, clearly this is a matter of opinion and it's apparent where the
opinion of those who are already familiar with Cocoa lie. (Hint: it
seems that those who have reached the point where they no longer need
to consult the reference for every other line of code they write
don't see a need to improve the reference :) ).
However, count me in for a vote for "adding bulk to the reference".
One of the biggest headaches I've had trying to learn Objective-C and
Cocoa has been the pitiful reference material that passes for
programmer documentation. Every now and then I find a reference
topic that has a nice elaboration and good details on the exact
behavior of an class or message, but more often than not the
reference is one or two vague sentences that make very little sense
until you find the half-dozen other topics that are relevant, but
which are not actually cross-referenced in the topic you're looking at.
Yes, I already read the memory management section of the fundamentals
guide. Yes, I've seen the description of the convention regarding
autorelease rules. And yet, it would still be very helpful to simply
go ahead and explicitly describe the autorelease behavior of each
method. Just because something follows a standard convention, that
doesn't mean that there's no use in documenting it everywhere that it
can already be inferred.
All over the Apple programming documentation, there is great
opportunity to make it better, especially with respect to being much
more explicit about the behavior of the various APIs, as well as how
different parts of the API relate to each other (anyone care to guess
how long it took me just to figure out how to _exclude_ a rectangle
from the current clipping area for my custom NSView?). And yes, I
would include in this change the addition of explicit statements of
the autorelease behavior of each and every method that returns a
reference to a class instance.
Just because there's already a rule that tells you that information,
that doesn't mean there's no value in providing that information
explicitly.
Pete
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