----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael G Schwern" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "K Stol" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 2:49 AM Subject: Re: What the heck is: timely destruction
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 11:38:22AM -0700, K Stol wrote: > > if I understood correctly, the problem is that some objects should be > > destroyed *immediately*, and should not wait for the GC. > > Yep. In perl 5 *all* objects and variables are to be destroyed immediately. > This doesn't necessarily mean that their memory has to be freed but that > at least their destructor methods are called. > > > > In fact, the programmer may have never heard about a garbage collecting > > system at all, and just *assume* that everything which is out of scope, > > is destroyed. > > Yep. That's how most languages with lexical variables work these days. > > > > In real life, these objects may live somewhere in memory, waiting for the GC, > > but in fact are still there, so checking them for being alive will not yield > > the correct result. > > I don't understand what you're saying there. Uhm, I didn't realize destructor methods were called, but now I see that's the whole point: destructor methods should be called when doing timely destruction. You already said just now: > This doesn't necessarily mean that their memory has to be freed but that > at least their destructor methods are called. So the objects may be still in memory. I thought the fact that they are still in memory was troublesome, but it's not, if I interpret your statement well. Klaas-Jan
