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Postings from February 2001
On Wed, Feb 14, 2001 at 09:59:31AM -0500, John Porter wrote: > James Mastros wrote: > > I'd think that an extension to delete is in order here. Basicly, delete > > should DESTROY the arg, change it's value to undef,... > Huh? What delete are you thinking of? This is Perl, not C++. Umm, perldoc -f delete? Come to think of it, this doesn't mesh purticularly well with the current meaning of delete. It does, however, with undef. In fact, it /is/ the current meaning of undef, except for the GC part. And perhaps the GC should be explicit or automatic, but not implicit. > > ...and trigger a GC that will get rid of the arg. > No. Perl decides for itself when to do GC. That's almost certianly a mistake. The programmer often /does/ know the expectations of the end-user better then the interpreter. If the programmer can GC when /he/ wants to, he can do so when the pause will have the least effect. Think of a program that you want to run near-realtime most of the time, but where you have a bit of downtime every now and again. A game comes immedetly to mind. Or, for that matter, a program that spawns an external process that might take a lot of memory, so does a GC before spawning it. (Because otherwise the OS will happily page out your garbage, resulting in massive amounts of unneeded IO.) -=- James Mastros -- "All I really want is somebody to curl up with and pretend the world is a safe place." AIM: theorbtwo homepage: http://www.rtweb.net/theorb/