weakrefs and bound methods

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 08 Oct 2007 04:06:55 +0000, Michele Simionato wrote:

> > Hmmm... I'm not sure I understand how a with statement is meant to
> > replace class.__del__ in practice. It seems to me that the two things
> > have different uses. with is useful when you create an object, do
> > something with it, dispose of it in an orderly fashion, and then
> > continue. How does that help when you create an unknown number of 
> > long-lasting objects where you can't predict how and when they will be
> > disposed of?

[snip]

>> Now, I don't think the above is feasible. What am I missing?
> 
> Rename your __del__ to close and call it explicitely:
> 
> p.close()
> alist[3].close()
> alist[853].close()
> alist[701].close()

Well, that utterly sucks. If I wanted to call finalizers explicitly, I'd 
be writing in C.

You say that using __del__ leads to hard-to-debug "bombs in my code 
waiting to explode at some unknown moment". Maybe so -- but so does 
explicitly managing resources by hand in the way you suggest, and quite 
frankly, I suspect I'd have a hell of a lot fewer bugs by relying on 
__del__ and the garbage collector than I would from managing resources 
manually in a big project.



-- 
Steven