What does "del" actually do?

[John Nagle]

    The Python "reference manual" says, for "del", "Rather that spelling it out 
in full details, here are some hints."  That's not too helpful.

    In particular, when "del" is applied to a class object, what happens?
Are all the instance attributes deleted from the object?  Is behavior
the same for both old and new classes?

    I'm trying to break cycles to fix some memory usage problems.

					John Nagle