On Friday 16 November 2001 08:25 am, Fritz Heinrichmeyer wrote:
> so you have to trigger garbage collection manually? Pythoneers can count
> on finalizing happening at once, as they use reference counting.

No; garbage collection happens automatically, though you can force it. 
However, there is no guarantee when a finalizer will get called, as in Java 
or Smalltalk.

In practice, this has not been a problem for me using Smalltalk for years, 
and I doubt that it will be a problem for me in Ruby.

In Ruby and Smalltalk, one tends to use guarded blocks, especially 
considering the possibility of exceptions:

begin
     # do stuff
ensure
    # cleanup
end

or (in Smalltalk):

[ "do stuff" ] ensure: [ "cleanup" ]

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned / bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com