Re: Trying to understand -- please help...

FROM : Sherm Pendley
DATE : Wed May 21 22:37:06 2008

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 3:37 PM, Johnny Lundy <<email_removed>> wrote:

>
> I submit that any experienced programmer looking up and turning to a page
> entitled "NSArray Class Reference" would "expect" that a behavior of the
> class that results in one's created object being deallocated out from under
> him would be documented in such a "Reference."



An experienced programmer would not be looking for high-level patterns that
apply to all of Cocoa in the docs for one specific class. He'd be looking in
the high-level conceptual docs where such information would most logically
be found.


> If he codes to what the Class Reference says, and his app doesn't work,
> that is in no way his fault.



If he skips over the "cocoa fundamentals" doc because he thinks he's too
experienced to need it, that absolutely *is* his fault. Knowledge of one
platform's conventions and patterns does *not* directly translate to
knowledge of another platform's, and experienced programmers understand that
fact.


> 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.



The fact that it *is* something fundamental is the reason it's not repeated
endlessly as part of every method's documentation. It's not part of any
particular class or method; it's a universal pattern and has its own
documentation.

sherm--

--
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net