Thank you again for the feedback. Attached is the updated patch.
@Po Lu, you were right about the dealloc method: I removed it since it was unnecessary.
I think I fixed all the issues you pointed out, but let me know if there's any other changes needed.
About the copyright assignment, I sent the attached email to
assign@gnu.org ten days ago, but haven't gotten a reply yet. Just want to make sure I'm going about it the right way: do I need to do anything else to get this done? It's my first contribution so I may be missing something.