Пример 3.9. Creating a FileInfo instance

>>> import fileinfo
>>> f = fileinfo.FileInfo("/music/_singles/kairo.mp3") 
>>> f.__class__                                        
<class fileinfo.FileInfo at 010EC204>
>>> f.__doc__                                          
'base class for file info'
>>> f                                                  
{'name': '/music/_singles/kairo.mp3'}

	We are creating an instance of the FileInfo class (defined in the fileinfo module) and assigning the newly created instance to the variable f. We are passing one parameter, /music/_singles/kairo.mp3, which will end up as the filename argument in FileInfo's __init__ method.
	Every class instance has a built-in attribute, __class__, which is the object's class. (Note that the representation of this includes the physical address of the instance on my machine; your representation will be different.) Java programmers may be familiar with the Class class, which contains methods like getName and getSuperclass to get metadata information about an object. In Python, this kind of metadata is available directly on the object itself through attributes like __class__, __name__, and __bases__.
	You can access the instance's doc string just like a function or a module. All instances of a class share the same doc string.
	Remember when the __init__ method assigned its filename argument to self["name"]? Well, here's the result. The arguments we pass when we create the class instance get sent right along to the __init__ method (along with the object reference, self, which Python adds for free).

	In Python, simply call a class as if it were a function to create a new instance of the class. There is no explicit new operator like C++ or Java.

If creating new instances is easy, destroying them is even easier. In general, there is no need to explicitly free instances, because they are freed automatically when the variables assigned to them go out of scope. Memory leaks are rare in Python.

Пример 3.10. Trying to implement a memory leak

>>> def leakmem():
...     f = fileinfo.FileInfo('/music/_singles/kairo.mp3') 
...     
>>> for i in range(100):
...     leakmem()                                          

Every time the leakmem function is called, we are creating an instance of FileInfo and assigning it to the variable f, which is a local variable within the function. Then the function ends without ever freeing f, so you would expect a memory leak, but you would be wrong. When the function ends, the local variable f goes out of scope. At this point, there are no longer any references to the newly created instance of FileInfo (since we never assigned it to anything other than f), so Python destroys the instance for us.

No matter how many times we call the leakmem function, it will never leak memory, because every time, Python will destroy the newly created FileInfo class before returning from leakmem.

The technical term for this form of garbage collection is “reference counting”. Python keeps a list of references to every instance created. In the above example, there was only one reference to the FileInfo instance: the local variable f. When the function ends, the variable f goes out of scope, so the reference count drops to 0, and Python destroys the instance automatically.

In previous versions of Python, there were situations where reference counting failed, and Python couldn't clean up after you. If you created two instances that referenced each other (for instance, a doubly-linked list, where each node has a pointer to the previous and next node in the list), neither instance would ever be destroyed automatically because Python (correctly) believed that there is always a reference to each instance. Python 2.0 has an additional form of garbage collection called “mark-and-sweep” which is smart enough to notice this virtual gridlock and clean up circular references correctly.

As a former philosophy major, it disturbs me to think that things disappear when no one is looking at them, but that's exactly what happens in Python. In general, you can simply forget about memory management and let Python clean up after you.