Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 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.
It gets even worse than that: the __del__ method actually *prevents* objects that participate in cycles from getting garbage-collected. Python's GC doesn't deallocate objects that define __del__. (The way to handle those is to grep for them in gc.garbage, break the cycles in a way that works for the application -- e.g. by removing the prev and next references -- and finally del gc.garbage[:].) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
