BarZ: Thank you very much for the enlightening comments...Yes they make a lot of sense.
I do not want to watch the WorldCup...The Chinese team is such a shame...I may cry if I watch them. jeff -----Original Message----- From: Barzilai Spinak [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, June 06, 2002 12:04 PM To: JDJList Subject: [jdjlist] In response to the question about member classes Every instance of an inner (or member) class is created from a previously existing instance of the enclosing class. (Unless the inner class is static, but let's not get into that) Inside the instance of the inner class there exists a pointer to the instance of the outer class from which the inner instance was derived. We all know how within an instance method we can use "this" to refer to the object on which the context of this method invocation takes place. Well, from within the methods of an inner class we can use another reference called "MyOuterClass.this" which points to the instance of the outer class from which the inner instance was derived. All this to show that, even if you think you lost all your references to the outer object and it's going to be garbage collected, it won't until all the inner objects derived from it have become unreachable. The inner objects only have meaning with respect to the outer object. That's why the outer object is not collected; it's still reachable from your inner objects. This also has a hidden problem. Let's say your inner object is also a thread and it's blocked waiting for something or other... and you lose references to both the outer and inner object... they won't be collected because the inner object which is a thread is still alive, and it points to the outer object... but they both have become unreachable from your code and the inner object(thread) probably can't be awaken or killed. Memory/resource leak here? I'd like someone else's view on this matter. Make good use of your finally's!!!!! I hope this makes sense. I haven't gotten much sleep watching the World Cup games. BarZ To change your membership options, refer to: http://www.sys-con.com/java/list.cfm To change your membership options, refer to: http://www.sys-con.com/java/list.cfm
