When to use alloc and init

Question

Hi All,

I've just been going through the exercises in the foundation framework section of objective C Basics and I have a question about the 'for' loop.

e.g. for (NSString *string in foo) {NSLog(@"%@", string);}

Why don't we need to alloc and init the variable declared NSString *string? As isn't it still an instance of the NSString object that will be holding a value and hence requiring space to allocated and initialised?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks, Alex

Answer 1 · 2013-12-10T02:35:23Z

December 10, 2013 2:35am

NSString *string is actually just a pointer to an object in the heap and pointers are designated by the *. You can think of a pointer as a note on a classroom door that says Go to classroom 131. In the case of fast enumeration (for in), you are going through an array that contains pointers to objects in the heap, so, you don't need to alloc and init them. The objects already exist in the heap and can't be nil since nil is not allowed in an array; nil is used to mark the end of the array. Remember, an array contains pointers to objects of unknown type id.

You want to alloc and init when and object doesn't exist in the heap. The objects get allocated (space is created for the object) and the object gets setup and you get a pointer to the object back.

Hope this makes sense

Answer 2 · 2013-12-10T03:50:33Z

December 10, 2013 3:50am

You can also read yesterday's thread that discussed this topic)

Answer 3 · 2013-12-10T07:11:22Z

December 10, 2013 7:11am

Excellent, thank you both, that is much clearer to me now, Alex

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When to use alloc and init

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