No destructor

[Martin von Loewis]

"Pete Shinners" <pete at visionart.com> writes:

> because of this i've never been able to let myself rely on
> the __del__ destructor. (will it be called???) will the new
> garbage cleanup in 2.0 fix this problem?

If __del__ was not called because the object was part of a cycle, then
it still is garbage in 2.0; if an object in an cycle has an __del__,
the cycle won't be collected. IOW,

class X:
  def __del__(self):
    print self
x=X()
x.next=x
x=None

will still produce garbage in Python 2.

If the __del__ was not called because the object was referred-to by a
cycle, and the cycle is collectable, then __del__ will be called:

x=[]
x.append(x)    # produce cycle
x.append(X())  # add reference to X instance
x=None

will release the list and the X instance.

Regards,
Martin