Consise doc on which C api calls do things with ref counts?
Tom Culliton
culliton at clark.net
Thu Mar 23 20:53:01 EST 2000
In article <8bc1qc$8ih at gap.cco.caltech.edu>,
Robert Kern <kern at caltech.edu> wrote:
>In article <uKeC4.1930$U95.30716 at news.pacbell.net>,
> "Grant Munsey" <gmunsey at adobe.com> writes:
>> I though I saw mention of a concise doc that tells exactly what
>> each of the Python C api calls does with object refcounts.
>> Is there such a thing?
Not really IMO.
>> I just wanna make sure I don't decrement my refcount one too
>> many times and disappear!
Probably better than leaking, since you're likely to detect it
faster. ;-)
>The main C API Reference was just updated today to provide that
>information.
>
>http://www.python.org/doc/api/api.html
It's a big improvement over what was there, but it could stand to be
even more explicit. Not to mention that I really hate the "steals a
reference" idiom, which is just not intuitive to me.
I really want to see something like:
does not modify ... (read only, limited scope)
makes a copy of ...
increfs ... (sharing)
decrefs ...
keeps a reference without increfing (assumes ownership)
returns a new ... (factory/constructor)
returns a copy of ...
...
called out explicitly for every parameter and the return value,
especially since none of the function protoytpes use "const" to
indicate when a parameter is used but not changed in any way.
BTW - Why don't we use const?
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