does python have useless destructors?

[John J. Lee]

Donn Cave <donn at u.washington.edu> writes:
[...snip excellent answer...]
> In article <slrnccetd9.gag.msoulier at tigger.digitaltorque.ca>,
> So yes, you can depend on immediate finalization in many
> common situations, but you have to accept the liability of
> a dependence on reference non-circularity and on the C Python.

Adding __del__ methods also, IIRC, has the disadvantage that it messes
up the GC that does reference-cycle collection.  When __del__ was
introduced, Python had no automatic cycle GC.

On balance, considering all these points, I never write __del__
methods any more, and I always (well, almost always) explictly close
files and other external resources.  Other people disagree, preferring
to avoid reference cycles (eg. using the weakref module) and to rule
out Jython.


John