On Dec 15, 2008, at 5:33 PM, Andrew Farmer wrote:
On 15 Dec 08, at 14:54, John Michael Zorko wrote:
Imagine this:
static NSMutableDictionary *lookup = [NSMutableDictionary new];
... now imagine a situation where I need to clear that dictionary.
If I call
[lookup release];
lookup = [NSMutableDictionary new];
... it will obviously be faster than coding a for loop and removing
each object in the dictionary, but since it was declared as static,
which is safer?
Neither. All that "static" means on a global variable is that the
symbol isn't visible from other source files. It has no bearing
whatsoever on the contents of that variable.
Although all global variables have static storage, quite aside from
the "static" keyword.
Perhaps John is confused about what is static in this case, though.
The storage for lookup, which is a pointer, is static. The mutable
dictionary object it points to, though, is not. It's allocated from
the heap.
I'm guessing that John is coming from C++ where you can truly have
statically allocated objects. If you do that, then it's wrong to use
the delete operator on such an object. But that's not analogous to
this case.
Regards,
Ken
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