Does python hate cathy?

[QS]

Thanks to you all! It's good to know...

On Mar 23, 9:02 pm, Carsten Haese <cars... at uniqsys.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-03-23 at 17:42 -0700, George Sakkis wrote:
> > That's really weird... it's reproducible on Windows too. It doesn't
> > make any sense why the name of the variable would make a difference.
> > My guess is you hit some kind of obscure bug.
>
> This is not a bug, just an unexpected feature:http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-January/304873.html
>
> What's happening is that at the end of the script, all objects in the
> global namespace are set to None (in order to decrease their reference
> count and trigger garbage collection). This happens in the order in
> which the names appear as keys in the globals dictionary. It randomly
> happens that "swaroop", "kalam", and "cath" all are hashed in front of
> "Person", but "cathy" is hashed after "Person".
>
> Hence, if Catherine is named cath, Python "None's" all the instances
> first and then the type last, and all is well. However, if Catherine is
> called cathy, Person is set to None before cathy. Then, in the lookup of
> the global name "Person" during cathy.__del__, Person is None, which
> doesn't have a "population" attribute, causing the AttributeError.
>
> Possible workarounds are:
> 1) Explicitly delete the global names for the instances before the
> script runs out.
> 2) Don't refer to the "Person" type by its global name in __del__, but
> indirectly as type(self). (This requires Person to be a new-style class,
> though.)
>
> --
> Carsten Haesehttp://informixdb.sourceforge.net