Circular refs

[skaller]

Tim Peters wrote:
> 
> [Adrian Eyre, on immortal cyclic trash]
> > I can dream up a million ways to kludge around this bug, but I
> > was referring to a 'fix' to the Python source code. How hard can
> > it be?
> 
> It's unclear, but I can give you a lower bound:  in all the years people
> have been whining about how easy this is to "fix", nobody has managed to fix
> it.

I think that is an unfair comment. There have been plenty of people
who have integrated garbage collectors into Python, including me,
but the effort is wasted if Guido doesn't adopt the solution.
The only exception to that is JPython (which does, of course, 'fix'
the problem). 

So the problem, in part, is that the state of Python is controlled by
Guido,
who is not willing to adopt any of the solutions. Guido has his
own priorities and reasons for doing things (which is fair enough!) 
Unfortunately, this leaves the community with two choices: 
take what Guido offers, or go elsewhere.

I'm past complaining about that, but I do think it is unfair to say
people
have been 'whining' about it. The same applies to making nested
functions
work correctly. It has been done, several times, but Guido is unwilling
to adopt any solution, which leaves Python programmers with a low level,
Basic like language. Eventually, people developing higher level
applications
will be forced to move on to a more powerful programming language.
Sigh. Even Perl has lexically scoped functions :-)

Viper is implemented for this reason: I'm sick of waiting for sensible
high level features, so I'm implementing them myself.

My comments also apply to C++ with an important difference: in that
case,
there was a mechanism for me to contribute to the language development,
and vote on issue resolution (and I did so). So while I may not much
like
the result of the consensus formation, at least the process admitted
community decision making, and generated a document describing the
semantics (that anyone could implement).

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller at maxtal.com.au
1/10 Toxteth Rd Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
homepage: http://www.maxtal.com.au/~skaller
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