On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 09:44:52PM +0100, Tim Bunce wrote: > On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 10:48:02AM -0700, Steve Fink wrote:
> > I guess you could think of the lifecycle of an individual object as > > being controlled by a few significant life events: > > > > 1. birth > > 2. the last reference disappearing > > 3. finalization > > 4. destruction > > That's a nice idea, but I suspect most people are thinking in perl5 > terms of "Timely DESTROY", so "destruction" is bound to be more > commonly used. so you might want to use 1. birth 2. the last reference disappearing 3. (object) destruction 4. (memory) deallocation which I believe is unambiguous. And the "timely destruction" problem is about ensuring that nothing at language level can spot a gap between steps 2 and 3. It's unclear now which event really is the object's "death", and I can't see any event corresponding to "taxes". :-) Nicholas Clark
