[Python-Dev] Re: [pygtk] How to delete Gtk objects (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Wed, 10 Oct 2001 18:05:12 -0400

which leads me to believe that del would not be called in the current implementation. If people are going to be subclassing more than the traditional builtin types I think del methods will have to be supported.

Correct, del is not yet supported. (coerce is, as of 2.2a4 at least). I'm not sure that del should be supported though: it causes problems with the garbage collector. The GC won't destroy objects with a del method because it's impossible to decide in which order to finalize mutually referencing objects.

Can somebody (e.g. whoever started this thread) present a good reason why del should be supported?

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)