Christopher J. Bottaro wrote:
2 Questions... 1) Why does this never happen in C++? Or does it, its just never happened to me? 2) I can understand random destruction of instantiated objects, but I find it weird that class definitions (sorry, bad terminology) are destroyed at the same time. So __del__ can't safely instantiate any classes if its being called as a result of interpreter shutdown? Boo...
Keep in mind that in Python, everything is a (dynamically created) object, including class objects. My recall of C/C++ memory organization is pretty weak, but IIRC it gives completely different behavior to code, stack objects, and heap objects. Code never needs to be cleaned up. In Python, everything (including functions and classes) is effectively a heap object, and thus functions and classes can (and indeed must) be cleaned up. Refcounting means that they won't ever (normally) be cleaned up while they're still in use, but during program shutdown refcounting necessarily ceases to apply.
The closest that would happen in C++, I believe, would manifest itself as memory leaks and/or access of already-freed memory.
Jeff Shannon Technician/Programmer Credit International
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