The del statement

[Sion Arrowsmith]

Marco Aschwanden <PPNTWIMBXFFC at spammotel.com> wrote:
[ ... ]
>> so what about
>>
>>      del x
>
>Ups. I never used it for an object. So far I only used it for deletion of  
>elements of a container. In that case del has two purposes:
>
>1. Deletes an item from a container (and of course destructs it) -->  
>list.remove(elem)
>2. Calls the destructor of an object --> list.destruct()
>
>One statement and two distinct purposes.

Leaving aside the discussion about whether Python has destructors or
not, you are mistaken on two counts:

1. del *is not responsible for an object being destroyed*. That is
done by the garbage collector.

2. del is only ever used to "delete an item from a container". It's
just that in the plain "del x" case, the container is implicitly the
current namespace. (In any case, it's not really "deleting an item
from a container", it's removing a reference to the item from the
container.)

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