Jim Jewett wrote: > If you're talking specific object instances, then the user is the > only one (outside of the Garbage Collection system) who has a > chance of knowing whether the rest of the iterator will be needed > later.
Indeed. He *does* know whether he will want the iterator again later. He *doesn't* know whether it will require finalization when he is eventually done with it, and failing to do so if needed will cause obscure bugs. Also, not needing it again is the overwhelmingly commoner use case. My conclusion is that finalization should be the default, with a way of explicitly overriding it when necessary. > If there are no remaining references, then garbage collection is the > answer, and maybe we just need to make it more aggressive. If > there are remaining references, then maybe the user is wrong about > being done. Or maybe he's not wrong, and due to the way things are coded, the reference happens to hang around a little longer than strictly needed. If garbage collection were sufficient, we'd be relying on it to close our files in the first place, and this whole thread would never have gotten started. -- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | [EMAIL PROTECTED] +--------------------------------------+ _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
