On Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:45:43 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: > In message <m2eitowaf2....@cs.uu.nl>, Piet van Oostrum wrote: > >> The exact time of the destruction of objects is an implementation >> detail and should not be relied upon. > > That may be true in Java and other corporate-herd-oriented languages, > but we know that dynamic languages like Perl and Python make heavy use > of reference-counting wherever they can. If it's easy to satisfy > yourself that the lifetime of an object will be delimited in this way, I > don't see why you can't rely upon it.
Reference counting is an implementation detail used by CPython but not IronPython or Jython. I don't know about the dozen or so other minor/new implementations, like CLPython, PyPy, Unladen Swallow or CapPython. In other words, if you want to write *Python* code rather than CPython code, don't rely on ref-counting. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
