I don't understand the description for bRetrieve (jquery DataTable)

Question

From this page:

http://datatables.net/new/1.7

Retrieving with an initialisation object - $(...).dataTable({"bRetrieve":true, ...}); - It is not possible to alter the table parameters after initialisation like this, but it is useful to be able to just use a single call to $().dataTable(). Setting bRetrieve to true, tells DataTables that you acknowledge this.

I think the following line is what I don't understand:

but it is useful to be able to just use a single call to $().dataTable(). Setting bRetrieve to true, tells DataTables that you acknowledge this.

Related is bDestroy:

Reinitialising the table - $(...).dataTable({"bDestroy":true, ...}); - Actually, it is possible to reinitialise the table, but its fairly brutal. This will destroy the old table and then initialise a new one.

Can someone explain how these interact? I feel like there are assumptions about things I should understand before reading this description, but obviously I don't.

Answer 1

As mention in the data-table site : http://www.datatables.net/ref

"bRetrieve" property is used to acknowledge datatable that you understand, in case for particular table if datatable instance is already created than instead of creating new object, datatable plugin will return the existing object.

EDIT :

Same applies for "bDestroy" property. It tells datatable, that this table can be destroy as well. If you set this property to false (which tells that you don't want destroy this table), than after calling fnDestroy() function on datatable object, one pop-up warning will come saying table can not be destroy.