On Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 10:48:02AM -0700, Steve Fink wrote:I don't know -- in Perl5, the two are tied together so closely that it's almost like naming the two halves of one thing: "DESTROY" becomes "finalize,destroy". The decision to "destroy" is what triggers Perl5's DESTROY invocation; Perl6 finalization is the body of the DESTROY method. Never mind that they're out of order. :-)
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.
Tim.
Whichever. If you are aware of the difference, it's usually easy enough to figure out which one people are talking about at any given moment (and to recognize when they're confused about which one it is they're talking about). I'm sticking to the "finalize" terminology, because that's what I've seen used in non-perl5y contexts when they're discussing exactly this issue. Since as you point out, "DESTROY" seems stuck in people's heads, so I'll only suggest to people that changing terminology might reduce the number of confused responses to their posted ponderings.
