Ratko wrote:
Say you have something like this:
for item in myList:
del item
Would this actually delete the item from the list or just decrement
the reference counter because the item in myList is not associated
with name "item" anymore (but still is with myList[itemIndex])? In
other words, is "item" a temporary reference to myList[itemIndex] or
is it actually that reference that myList has stored?
The 'del' statement does not delete an object, it deletes a reference to
an object. In this case, the variable item is deleted from the scope,
and the referred-to object will have its reference counter decremented
by 1. (But, as you surmise, not to zero, because the list will still
reference it.)
You could remove the object from the list with
del myList[i]
if you knew i. HOWEVER, don't do that while looping through the list!
Changing a list's length will interact badly with the for loop's
indexing through the list, causing the loop to mis the element following
the deleted item.
Gary Herron
I am not sure if this question even makes any sense anymore. I've been
using python for years and never had any problems (and I don't now
either) but now that I had to revisit c++/STL, I had to deal about
these issues and was wondering how python does it.
Thanks,
Ratko
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