[Python-3000] PEP: Eliminate __del__

[Michael Bayer]

On May 5, 2007, at 6:12 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

>
> The reason for initially pursuing a recipe approach for weakref  
> based finalisation is that it allows time to determine whether or  
> not there are better recipes than whatever is proposed in the PEP  
> before casting it in the form of fixed language syntax. Adding  
> syntactic sugar for a recipe is child's play compared to trying to  
> get rid of syntax (or change its semantics) after discovering it is  
> broken in some fashion.
>

if the recipe is just an interim step towards developing something  
that "just works", then we agree.   obviously explicit finalization  
is preferable and relying upon cpython's "immediate" GC of non-cycled  
objects is a bad trap to fall into (particularly if you then run the  
same code using Jython for example)...but in a garbage collected  
language, the "loose ends" still need some way to clean themselves up  
even if its deferred.