Bugs item #1717900, was opened at 2007-05-12 17:41 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by gagenellina You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=105470&aid=1717900&group_id=5470
Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread, including the initial issue submission, for this request, not just the latest update. Category: Python Interpreter Core Group: None Status: Pending Resolution: None Priority: 5 Private: No Submitted By: Wolf Rogner (wrogner) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: Destructor behavior faulty Initial Comment: I tried example 11.4. from bytesofpython (by C.H. Swaroop). Example works fine. Added a new Person instance 'wolf' -> Program terminated with: Exception exceptions.AttributeError: "'NoneType' object has no attribute 'population'" in <bound method Person.__del__ of <__main__.Person instance at 0xb7d48d6c>> ignored added print list(globals()) -> ['kalam', '__builtins__', '__file__', 'DBGPHideChildren', 'swaroop', 'Person', 'wolf', '__name__', '__doc__'] changed wolf to aaa: print list(globals()) -> ['aaa', 'kalam', '__builtins__', '__file__', 'DBGPHideChildren', 'swaroop', 'Person', '__name__', '__doc__'] Please note the position of 'aaa' at the beginning of the list, before 'Person'. With 'wolf' being after 'Person'. If the destructing code removes items in this order, no wonder I get an error. Person should not get deleted if refcount is still > 0. Wolf Rogner ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Gabriel Genellina (gagenellina) Date: 2007-05-15 15:44 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=479790 Originator: NO FWIW, the script name appears to be relevant as well. I were going to say that I could not reproduce it as it was; this same example saved as "a.py" doesn't show the error; "w.py" does. To the OP: Module finalization is a fragile step; this is a long standing issue and could be improved, but anyway I don't think it can be made robust enough (this is just my opinion!). I usually try to *never* reference any globals in destructors. In this case, using self.__class__ instead of Person is safer and works fine; if other globals were needed they could be passed as default argument values. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Alan McIntyre (alanmcintyre) Date: 2007-05-14 12:38 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=1115903 Originator: NO I took the example mentioned from here: http://www.python.org/doc/essays/cleanup/ and added this line to the end: wolf = Person('wolf') and it gives the reported error. Here is a minimal snippet that produces the same error when executed as the top-level module: class Person: population = 0 def __del__(self): Person.population -= 1 wolf = Person() This appears to be consistent with the behavior described here: http://www.python.org/doc/essays/cleanup/ While I understand that cleaning up a module at exit time is probably not an easy thing to make arbitrarily smart, this behavior seems a little too not-smart to me. It seems like it's not all that hard to get bitten by it, and the error makes no sense unless you're familiar with the module cleanup algorithm. For what it's worth, I offer to help make module cleanup a little smarter, although I may not be able to spend much time on it until I finish some things I'm already committed to do. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Alan McIntyre (alanmcintyre) Date: 2007-05-12 20:36 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=1115903 Originator: NO Could you post the code for your entire script? It makes it a lot easier to figure out what's going on. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=105470&aid=1717900&group_id=5470 _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com