Memory leak in TableIO?

[Mark Fardal]

sjmachin at lexicon.net (John Machin) writes:
> At first glance, there are several instances of
> 
> status = PyList_Append( myList, PyFloat_FromDouble(atof(string)) );
> 
> This needs to be changed to
> 
> tmp_obj = PyFloat_FromDouble(atof(string)) );
> status = PyList_Append( myList, tmp_obj );
> Py_DECREF(tmp_obj);

I wondered about that...but thought perhaps the PyList_Append
decremented the object by itself.

> There may well be other leaks, there may well be other problems, but
> plugging the above leak of one Python float object per table element
> should get you a lot further ...

Yes indeed.  Do some of the calls to Py_BuildValue also leak memory?  
How about PyArg_ParseTuple?  PyArg_Parse?  But if so, those are still just 
memory leaks.  You pointed out a memory gush.

> You will notice that there is no error checking on the result of the
> PyFloat_FromDouble() call, presumably because atof() is expected to
> return a legal double even if the input string is not a valid
> representation of a floating-point number [see example below], and so
> the presumption is that PyFloat_FromDouble() cannot fail. However
> given your opening remark that you use this module "since it's very
> fast", this may not be a concern to you :-)

Well, not at the moment, since I know what is in my data files. :->
But good you pointed it out.  Is a PyFloat the same thing as a C double,
by the way?  Or is it machine dependent?  

thanks much,
Mark