"David Stanek" <dsta...@dstanek.com> wrote
But I think (someone confirms/contradicts?) there is no harm
in overloading a class's __del__ to accomplish additional tasks
such as deleting temp disk space/dirs/files that need to exist
only during object creation.
Incorrect.
Why?
implementation. By the time it's executed many of the resources that
you want to clean up could have already been garbage collected.
True, but the things Denis refers to - temp disk space etc - will
never be garbage collected. The GC only tidies up the stuff in
memory.
If the object, as seems to be the case here, creates a file on disk
which it uses as a semaphore/lock then GC will leave that file
on the disk. A __del__ would enable it to be removed.
def __del__(self):
try:
self.f.close()
except:
pass
This is, I agree, pointless. but very different to:
def __ del__(self):
try:
os.remove(self.lockname)
except: pass
Of course the question of whether using disk storage to indicate
object lifetime is a good design pattern is another issue altogether!
--
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
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