Re: [TCLCORE] TIP #257: Object Orientation for Tcl

[Kristoffer L. <se...@fi...>]

On 28 Sep 2005, at 20:32, Zoran Vasiljevic wrote:

> In Tcl, I (mostly) do not care about when/how *something*
> (there are exceptions to that, rather) is allocated or
> deallocated.  The Tcl does this for me == I'm more productive.
> Why would OO objects be different?
>
> A kind of simple refcounting mechanism?
>
> We have that already on the Tcl_Obj level. I'm wondering if we
> can employ such when dealing with OO objects? An Tcl_OO thing?
> Or am I leaning too much out of the window? Needless to say that
> I didn't think of the implementation yet. Just the idea seems very  
> sexy.
>
> Would that be doable at all?

This kind of thing has actually been discussed umpteen times.  
Unfortunately it's not currently possible to do it in a foolproof  
way. As everything is a string, a list of objects might get turned to  
a string and the original objects lost (f.ex. apparently [eval] does  
this). That would result in all the objects being destroyed, assuming  
that was their only reference.

I'd love to see a working scheme like that too. Memory management  
should be automatic, if at all possible. This is just one area where  
Tcl's design principles make it more difficult. If the ladder-strings  
ever get implemented, there's a chance refcount based object  
management could be mostly workable.

            /  http://www.fishpool.com/~setok/