Dear XOTcl Community,

Annoucing new init+destroy scheme: Due to constant questions and problems regarding object destroy + creation + recreate, we have decided to provide a new destroy scheme in XOTcl 0.84. It will have only slight observable differences to the current destroy scheme, but is more flexible and allows for recreation.

I'll explain how it is currently implemented:

"create" and "alloc" are both now Class instprocs handling creation for their instances. I.e. [self] alloc is wrong ... correct is now: <className> alloc [self]

There is a new method "instdestroy" on Class that handles physical destruction of an object. The method "destroy" on Object has now the behavior:

Object instproc destroy args { [[self] info class] instdestroy [self] }

Everything is written in C ... I'll use XOTcl code just for explanation...

"create" now distinguishes between:

1) creating a new object: calls alloc + <doInitializations>

2) recreating an existing object calls: [self] class <givenClass> [self] cleanup ;# resets <self> into a state as after original <init> <givenClass> recreate [self]

"recreate" is a new method that can be customized. Its default behaviour is: <doInitializations>

<doInitializations> is called in C and is the same for recreate and (1): - search for parameter default values - call "-" initialization methods - call "init"

each of those will have a method call that can be changed, intercepted, etc. Of course, you can also overload or intercept cleanup, recreate, instdestroy, etc.

Comments?

Greetings, Uwe