On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 12:56 AM, Jens Alfke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It's never a good idea to > make assumptions about where a Foundation object is putting its data; > if you need to access the current bytes of an NSData, call -bytes on it.
This was a little confusing to me until I thought about it a bit, so I thought I would emphasize this. When you use these methods and tell it to free the memory, the object you create takes ownership of the block of memory. This means that it's responsible for freeing it, but more importantly it means that it's *in control* of freeing it. In other words, conceptually speaking it's never safe to refer back to this block of memory directly after you create the object. Instead you should query the object to get whatever you need from it, in this case query the -bytes method to get the pointer back. If I understand the API contract, the code in question is not even safe when using NSData. It happens to work, but the contract does not guarantee it. To be safe, the NSData should be created, then the return value from its -bytes method should be returned. If I'm wrong about this, I'd appreciate any corrections. Mike _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
