Thanks - I discussed the problem with a colleague, he suggested using a wrapper class, I thought some autoload magic could make it transparent - as ever, someone on CPAN already has a solution :-)

As I understand it, Object::Destroyer will by default call the DESTROY method on the object it guards - this may close resources, but won't cause other references to the object to become undefined, which is what I was trying to achieve. Other packages had a file scoped reference to the object in question, which would become stale, if my understanding is correct.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
our $other;
my $main = foo->new();
print "undef object: ";<STDIN>;
undef $main;
print "exit: ";<STDIN>;

package foo;
use Object::Destroyer;
sub new {
        my $package = shift;
        my $self = {};
        bless $self => $package;
        $::other = $self;
        my $ret = Object::Destroyer->new($self);
        return $ret;
}
sub DESTROY {
        my $self =shift;
        print "DESTROYing $self\n";
        #undef $self # doesn't help
}

[download]

outputs: 

undef object:
DESTROYing foo=HASH(0x817f9d0)
exit:
DESTROYing foo=HASH(0x817f9d0)

[download]

I had a look at the packages with file scoped references, and realised that I was just creating problems for myself - if I made objects call the constructor in question from a lexical/function scope, pretty much all of my problems go away - lexical scoping takes care of everything.

In reply to Re^2: return weak reference by flipper
in thread return weak reference by flipper

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