You can get the same effect by not naming the value being thrown away
This is absolutely true, although I don't think that's a particularly strong argument against it. The same can be said of `std::move` in C++. The purpose of this suggestion is primarily to allow introducing names without it coming at the cost of unwanted reference counts. Consider the following expression, with no intermediate names: h = get_h_long_name(get_g_long_name(get_f_long_name(x)) With my proposal, this would become exactly equivalent to the following in terms of reference counts f = get_f_long_name(del x) g = get_g_long_name(del f) h = get_h_long_name(del g)
Do you have an example of an application where this sort of micro-optimisation is significant enough to justify a fairly major language change?
As an example of these optimizations being valuable, see https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/7997, which claims the optimization I described at the beginning resulted in a 1.5x-2x speedup.
but that didn't need a language change to implement...
The language change I'm proposing isn't about _implementing_ these optimizations, it's about allowing users to exploit them without having to sacrifice naming their variables. Eric