Lifetime of a local reference

[Gregory Ewing]

Alan Bawden wrote:
> The Java compiler has no way to know whether a variable references an
> object with a finalize() method that has side effects

It should be able to tell in some situations, e.g.

     String a = "hello";
     String b = a.replace('e', 'u');

There's no way that b can reference anything other than a
plain String instance at this point.

Maybe Java implementations are living dangerously and making
assumptions beyond this. My point is that I would expect a
Python implementation to be careful enough not to get this
wrong.

-- 
Greg