[Python-Dev] Design question: call __del__ only after successful __init__?

[Ka-Ping Yee]

On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, Greg Stein wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> >...
> > But it is just as likely that calling __del__ on a partially
> > uninitialized object is a bad mistake, and I am doing all these cases
> > a favor by not calling __del__ when __init__ failed!
> > 
> > Any opinions?  If nobody speaks up, I'll make the change.
> 
> +1 on calling __del__ IFF __init__ completes successfully.

That would be my vote as well.

What convinced me of this is the following:

If it's up to the implementation of __del__ to deal with a problem
that happened during initialization, you only know about the problem
with very coarse granularity.  It's a pain (or even impossible) to
then rediscover the information you need to recover adequately.

If on the other hand you deal with the problem in __init__, then
you have much better control over what is happening, because you
can position try/except blocks precisely where you need them to
deal with specific potential problems.  Each block can take care
of its case appropriately, and re-raise if necessary.

In general, it seems to me that what you want to do when __init__
runs afoul is going to be different from what you want to do to
take care of object cleanup in __del__.  So it doesn't belong
there -- it belongs in an except: clause in __init__.

Even though it's an incompatibility, i really think this is the
right behaviour.


-- ?!ng

"To be human is to continually change.  Your desire to remain as you are
is what ultimately limits you."
    -- The Puppet Master, Ghost in the Shell