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Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:27:45 -0700
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Subject: Re: Best way to disconnect from ldap?
From: Chris Rebert <clp2@rebertia.com>
To: Tycho Andersen <tycho@tycho.ws>
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On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 6:14 AM, Tycho Andersen <tycho@tycho.ws> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 04:49:54PM -0500, Tim Chase wrote:
>> On 03/21/12 15:54, Chris Kaynor wrote:
>> >As Chris Rebert pointed out, there is no guarantee as to when the
>> >__del__ method is called. CPython will generally call it immediately,
>> >however if there are reference cycles it may never call it
>>
>> And more maddeningly, modules/objects used/called from within the
>> __del__ may have already gone out of scope, producing
>> head-scratching errors. =C2=A0I've been bitten by this enough times that
>> I just stopped using __del__ completely.
>
> I've had similar experiences. In fact, in light of all this - why does
> __del__ exist at all? Novice python users may (reasonably) assume it
> behaves similarly to a C++ destructor (even though the docs warn
> otherwise).
>
> Given that you can't trust __del__, is there a legitimate use case for
> it?

Writing resource classes (like `file`) in C? Their __del__()s
typically involve little/less Python-level stuff and thus less
paranoia need be exercised.
There is somewhat of a perverse incentive in having such last-ditch
clean-up mechanisms though. "This code seems to work fine without
`with`, so why bother changing it?"

Cheers,
Chris