On Sunday 11 February 2001 19:08, Jan Dubois wrote: > However, I couldn't solve the problem of "deterministic destruction > behavior": Currently Perl will call DESTROY on any object as soon as the > last reference to it goes out of scope. This becomes important if the > object own scarce external resources (e.g. file handles or database > connections) that are only freed during DESTROY. Postponing DESTROY until > an indeterminate time in the future can lead to program failures due to > resource exhaustion. But doesn't resource exhaustion usually trigger garbage collection and resource reallocation? (Not that this addresses the remainder of your post.) -- Bryan C. Warnock bwarnock@(gtemail.net|capita.com)