Jeffrey Schwab <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > > You may be gratified to learn that Python's main storage model > > is reference counted objects, and when an object falls out of > > all referenced scopes its finalizers run immediately. > > Thanks, that's good to know! For some reason I had it in my head that > Python always used mark & sweep. I'm used to ref-counted collection in > Perl, but I never relied on it because of a nagging (probably > ill-founded) worry about cyclic references. Does Python have any way > around this? Is there a Python equivalent to C++ destructors?
Python (main implementation, known as CPython) uses mark-and-sweep (with generations &c) to deal with cyclic garbage -- but destructors (__del__ methods) *interfere* with cyclic garbage collection (there may be no safe order of freeing a bunch of cyclic garbage when objects have __del__ methods, and Python can't find it if there is, anyway). > I think Java has had a big influence, too. People just don't seem to > want to be bothered with thinking about object life cycles at all. This > seems unfortunate to me, because cleanup still has to be done, so it > just ends up getting moved outside the objects where it belongs. I > think this hurts abstraction. Python 2.5 should introduce a 'with' statement that may go partways towards meeting your qualms; it's an approved PEP, though I do not recall its number offhand. Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
