Exceptions and Object Destruction (was: Problem with apsw and garbage collection)

[Paul Rubin]

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes:
> > Reference counting is an implementation detail used by CPython but not
> > [implementations built on runtimes designed for corporate-herd-oriented
> > languages, like] IronPython or Jython.
> 
> I rest my case.

You're really being pretty ignorant.  I don't know of any serious Lisp
system that uses reference counting, both for performance reasons and
to make sure cyclic structures are reclaimed properly.  Lisp is
certainly not a corporate herd language.

Even CPython doesn't rely completely on reference counting (it has a
fallback gc for cyclic garbage).  Python introduced the "with"
statement to get away from the kludgy CPython programmer practice of
opening files and relying on the file being closed when the last
reference went out of scope.