From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2001-11-29T06:32:03+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26837] Re: Ref Counting (was KDE or GNOME curiosity question...)

On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, mark hahn wrote:

> I'm thinking now that using scope is the only good way to get quick
> finalization, with the fopen/block trick being the best example.

The problem with scoping is that it doesn't work if you need to share the
object among many different other objects.

I've never personally run into this problem, but I know that it can come
up.  Just recently, in [ruby-talk:25477], there was talk of wanting to
close a database connection automatically.  To summarize, the author
wanted to use a finalizer, but he was (fortunately) able to use scoping
instead.  Matz said he was in favor of explicit disconnection from the
database.  However, imo, explicit disconnection could be error-prone, but
it's probably the only reliable way to do this in Ruby for the cases where
a block will not suffice.

Paul