Here's my $0.02. I agree with the sentiments that use of finalizers should be discouraged. They are extremely helpful in cases like tempfile.TemporaryFileWrapper, so I think that they should be supported. I do think that the language should not promise a high level of service. Some observations: - I spent a little bit of time on the ANSI Smalltalk committee, where I naively advocated adding finalizers to the language. I was resoundingly told no. :) - Most of the Python objects I deal with these days are persistent. Their lifetimes are a lot more complicated that most Python objects. They get created once, but they get loaded into and out of memory many times. In fact, they can be in memory many times simultaneously. :) A couple of years ago I realized that it only made sense to call __init__ when an object was first created, not when it is subsequently (re)loaded into memory. This led to a change in Python pickling semantics and the deprecation of the loathsome __getinitargs__ protocol. :) For me, a similar case can be made against use of __del__ for persistent objects. For persistent objects, a __del__ method should only be used for cleaning up the most volatile of resources. A persistent object __del__ should not perform any semantically meaningful operations because __del__ has no semantic meaning. - Zope has a few uses of __del__. These are all for non-persistent objects. Interesting, in grepping for __del__, I found a lot of cases where __del__ was used and then commented out. Finalizers seem to be the sort of thing that people want initially and then get over. I'm inclined to essentially keep the current rules and simply not promise that __del__ will be able to run correctly. That is, Python should call __del__ and ignore exceptions raised (or provide some *optional* logging or other debugging facility). There is no reason for __del__ to fail unless it depends on cyclicly-related objects, which should be viewed as a design mistake. OTOH, __del__ should never fail because module globals go away. IMO, the current circular references involving module globals are unnecessary, but that's a different topic. ;) Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:jim@digicool.com Python Powered! Technical Director (888) 344-4332 http://www.python.org Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com http://www.zope.org Under US Code Title 47, Sec.227(b)(1)(C), Sec.227(a)(2)(B) This email address may not be added to any commercial mail list with out my permission. Violation of my privacy with advertising or SPAM will result in a suit for a MINIMUM of $500 damages/incident, $1500 for repeats.