strange __del__ behavior

[Bernhard Herzog]

John Hunter <jdhunter at ace.bsd.uchicago.edu> writes:

> For debugging purposes, I would like to know when C instances are
> being deleted; that's why I inserted the __del__ print method.  Is
> there any way to get that info w/o defining __del__ and thereby
> screwing up python's garbage collection?

I've sometimes used something like this:

class DelReporter:

    def __init__(self, message):
        self.message = message

    def __del__(self):
        print self.message


class C:

    def __init__(self):
        self.__del = DelReporter("__del__: %r" % self)


Even if a C-instance is part of a cycle, its __del member is not, so
it's __del__ doesn't affect garbage collection.


   Bernhard

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