Tim Peters wrote:
Neil Schemenauer:
Is there some way to prevent people from assigning to certain module variables?
Not that I know of. If you're terribly concerned, gc could look up "garbage" in its dict on each access. That's what, e.g., PRINT_ITEM does with sys.stdout. Then it would also have to check that it's a list, etc.
What would happen if it's not a list? PRINT_ITEM raises RuntimeError. I suppose the collector could do the same.
But I'd be keener to see new words spelling out which parts of the gc interface are and aren't intended "to work" across releases ...
All of them? :-) Seriously, there could come a time when GC can no longer be disabled. The debugging and threshold stuff is fairly implementation dependent. get_referrers() and get_objects() are highly implementation dependent. I suppose gc.collect() should always be available. Anything else is fair game, IMHO. Incidentally, I can't say I'm happy with GC as it stands. It uses too much memory now that so many objects are tracked. I had worked on the idea of a separate heap for GC objects for a while but couldn't figure out how to make generational collection to work. As Don Beaudry's sig says: "so much code, so little time". :-) Neil