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For those not familiar with Objective-C, the title is an allusion to manual memory management (i.e. no garbage collection).

When you are done using an object, you call its 'release' method. Once everyone using the object has called 'release' on the object, it is deallocated.

Depressingly poetic.

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Except that c4 is actually c4[] (There have been c4[0], c4[1], etc so far).

So calling release on that would not be a great idea. Just saying.

(And yes, I am really fun at parties.)

No, it's reference counting, which by definition is not manual memory management. Rentzsch used this notation because he, like most Mac developers, uses Objective-C, a language that has had any significant pertinence to the iPhone only for the last few months.

You manually count references. It has plenty of the downsides of manual memory management, even if some silly technical distinction puts it into the camp of the vastly superior (in terms of programmer time) solutions offered by higher level languages (Java, lisps, Python, Ruby, Perl, C#, etc.).

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