Fredrik Lundh wrote: > Jeffrey Schwab wrote: > > >>>>>the problem isn't determining who owns it, the problem is determining >>>>>who's supposed to release it. that's not a very common problem in a >>>>>garbage-collected language... >>>> >>>>Yes it is. Memory is only one type of resource. >>> >>>Python's garbage collector deals with objects, not memory. >> >>But you don't want to spin and wait for the garbage collector to release >>the object that happens to be holding a thread lock... > > > no, but arguing that sockets and thread locks are objects that suffer > from ownership problems is rather silly.
Why? Are those resources somehow less important than memory? > if their use isn't localized to a > single function or a single manager object, your design is flawed. ! I disagree. Suppose some code is written to work with any file-like object. Now suppose a file-like object is passed in that represents some URL. The first time the object is read, the object opens a suitable network connection. When is it safe to close that connection? The client code can't say, because it doesn't even know any network connection has been opened. In a language with deterministic destructors, the destructor can be relied on to close the connection as soon as the object goes out of scope. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
