Dan Sugalski writes: > Also, with all this stuff, people are going to find timely destruction > is less useful than they might want, what with threads and > continuations, which'll screw *everything* up, as they are wont to do. > I know I've been making heavy use of continuations myself, and this is > for a compiler for a language that doesn't even have subroutines in > it. Continuations screw everything up, which is always fun, for > unusual values of 'fun'.
When I programmed in C++ with proper use of the STL and other such abstractions, almost the only time I needed destructors were for block-exit actions. Perl 6 has block-exit hooks, so you don't need to use destructors to fudge those anymore. And there's a lot less explicit memory management in languages with GC (that's the point), so destructors become even less useful. I agree with Dan completely here. People make such a big fuss over timely destruction when they don't realize that they don't really need it. (But they want it). I think, more importantly, they don't understand what they're getting in return for giving it up. Luke
