On Thu, 7 Sept 2023 at 23:51, Daniel Walker <nickel...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Perhaps this is a solution in search of a problem but I recently encountered > this situation in one of my projects. > > I have an object, foo, which, due to the references it contains, I'd rather > not keep around longer than necessary. > > I use foo to instantiate another object: > > bar = Bar(foo) > > bar is free to manipulate foo however it wants and even del it if necessary. > However, since the foo name is still around, those resources won't get > cleaned up even if bar is done with them. The simple solution is > > bar = Bar(foo) > del foo > bar.do_stuff() > > I think it would be a nice (and, I hope, painless) addition to the Python > grammar to have del return a reference to the underlying object. That way, I > could simply do > > bar = Bar(del foo) > > What do y'all think? Juice not worth the squeeze? >
If you consider that a namespace is very much like a dictionary, what you're really doing is a dict.pop() operation - a destructive read. So it definitely does make sense. However, "del" is a statement, so it would be a bit awkward to retrofit. Maybe it'd work? It certainly is a sensible thing to do. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/5EZ5APBGMJO55CCXWAIGOYW4QTRY2ZC7/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
