On Wed, Feb 14, 2001 at 09:59:31AM -0500, John Porter wrote:
> James Mastros wrote:
> > I'd think that an extension to delete is in order here. Basicly, delete
> > should DESTROY the arg, change it's value to undef,...
> Huh? What delete are you thinking of? This is Perl, not C++.
Umm, perldoc -f delete?
Come to think of it, this doesn't mesh purticularly well with the current
meaning of delete. It does, however, with undef. In fact, it /is/ the
current meaning of undef, except for the GC part. And perhaps the GC should
be explicit or automatic, but not implicit.
> > ...and trigger a GC that will get rid of the arg.
> No. Perl decides for itself when to do GC.
That's almost certianly a mistake. The programmer often /does/ know the
expectations of the end-user better then the interpreter. If the programmer
can GC when /he/ wants to, he can do so when the pause will have the least
effect.
Think of a program that you want to run near-realtime most of the time, but
where you have a bit of downtime every now and again. A game comes
immedetly to mind.
Or, for that matter, a program that spawns an external process that might
take a lot of memory, so does a GC before spawning it. (Because otherwise
the OS will happily page out your garbage, resulting in massive amounts of
unneeded IO.)
-=- James Mastros
--
"All I really want is somebody to curl up with and pretend the world is a
safe place."
AIM: theorbtwo homepage: http://www.rtweb.net/theorb/
