Function Reference: Difference between revisions

|style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0"|If you're wondering what is a "Self" variable, it is a natural consequence of object oriented programming which propagates, along with everything else, the concept of a class and an instance of that class, also called an object. A very common example for explaining the class/instance relationship is the difference between a blueprint of a car and the actual car which is made from that blueprint. You can have a bunch of cars based upon a single blueprint. For anything useful, you can't know all the cars that are going to be created from your blueprint, so you need a method of determining upon which car has some function been invoked/used. To be direct, you can't turn on the radio of a blueprint, it's a piece of paper. But you can do it in a real car, made from the blueprint. One might tune in to a hard rock station. And another car could tune to a station that plays Rebecca Black's song "Friday" all day. Now, Replace the word "blueprint" with "class" and "car" with "instance/object" in your head. That difference is crucial, capture it. The way you find out which object is being possibly modified by a function is by silently pushing in an additional hidden parameter to a function which contains the memory address of the "victim" object, of the logical name "Self". In some languages, '''self''' is called '''this'''.

On a serious note, one could ask: "'''Why should I ever want to use this "Self" variable when I can simply change any variable I want directly? I know they exist in the blueprint, therefore they are also in the instance. That's the whole point, is it not?'''" Sort of, young samurai. But not really, everything you do actually is resolved by the compiler to use the '''this/self''' pointer. If you change an integer member variable '''something''' to 5, what you do is: "'''something = 5;'''". What actually happens internally is "'''self->something = 5;'''". '''Self''' is your silent guardian, a watchful protector... A dark knight.

Here's just a simple taste from general programming which includes '''Self''''s explicit usage, imagine that you've got a function invoked on an object (sometimes called a '''non-static member function/method''' or perhaps an '''instance-level member function/method''') that takes a parameter that points to an object of the same class. And you want to make sure you're not being fed the very object the function has been invoked upon. That mouthful is referred to as "self-reference". With "Self", you can check whether pObject is equal to Self and prevent damaging or unnecessary code from executing. If you can't think of a useful application of this example, it comes in handy with dynamic memory management and functions called setters.

Here, let's pretend that you are trying to change an object crucial to your application and you want to release the old one because you're a good memory citizen who cares about his users and their limited memory resources. So, you want to first release the old object and then set the pointer to the new one, right? But what if a nasty scenario occurs where you replace the object with itself? You release the old object, set the pointer to the memory address of the "new" object (which is, actually, the old object), try to dereference it (a fancy word for "use it") and boom - a wild unicorn appears and destroys your application '''if you're lucky'''. Usually, the memory is just cleared to be overwritten, the system might not use it immediately, therefore, in some cases - your application could work and make your life miserable by reports of crashing. You made a dangling pointer which references an object that was released (by you, a moment ago). Do you, perhaps, see how you could solve this? Yes, exactly. If newObject is NOT equal to Self (newObject != Self), then release the object referenced by Self and change the Self pointer/variable to point to newObject (Self = newObject). And you've solved all of your life's troubles. Kittens are purring. Birds are singing. And gamers are cursing at the dragon that killed them because your game or mod is awesome.