On Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:58:51 +0000, Edward A. Falk wrote:
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> Patrick Mullen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>>Then again, I can count the number of times I have ever needed __del__
>>with no fingers (never used it!). Still, quite interesting to
>>explore.
>
> I used it once, for an object that had a doubly-linked list.
> The __del__() method walked the list, setting all the elements'
> prev/next pointers to None to make sure the elements of the list would
> get garbage-collected.
Without the `__del__()` the elements would get garbage collected just
fine. If you don't want to wait until the garbage collector in CPython
detects the cycle, you can use `weakref`\s for one of the two "pointers"
in each element.
Ciao,
Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
