Circular references and python

[Jason Stokes]

James Logajan wrote in message <3899026C.7FD4481E at Lugoj.Com>...
>Neel Krishnaswami wrote:
>> Apply Neil Schemenauer's patches that convinces Python to use the
>> Boehm garbage collector, or just live with the garbage, if your
>> program is relatively short-lived. You can find his patch at:
>>
>>   http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~nascheme/python/gc.html
>>
>> Manually freeing memory is ugly and error-prone. Don't do it. :)
>
>The vast majority of code (and programming languages) in the world require
>explicit memory de-allocation. I don't believe that a GC scheme has yet
been
>invented that will work well for all problem domains. I'm sure if it had,
>we'd all be using it by now. ;)

First of all we should distinguish language from implementations of
languages, but in this case the line is a little blurry.

LISP, Smalltalk, Java, Delphi and Eiffel implementations all use garbage
collection as a standard techniqure.  More pertinantly, I don't *want* to
manually manage object deallocation in my application, and manual memory
management is the kind of low level process I expect a scripting language to
protect me from.  I definitely think the Python interpreter should have a
standard garbage collection mode, if only as an option.