After reading perlxs, perlxstut, and perlguts, you'll find that this is entirely possible. By decrementing the "pointer" field of any var to 0, the garbage collector will come by and nuke it. This is entirely possible in Perl, thanks to the wonderful Inline module. This is not adviseable since accessing a variable which has been nuked by the garbage collector (not possible in Perl alone) will result in "undefined" behavior.

Another method is to call one of the perlxs' free commands which will nuke the var immediately. But be warned, using such functionality may result in a debugging nightmare. In short, I don't see this as overly useful. Especially in OO software, where I WANT the object to go out of scope and call a DESTROY block, I don't see a need for free(). I see this as just a nother reason perl is cool. If you really want to know when something is gone, put it into scope. This is the most obvious and reasonable use for a scope. using well-designed scopes will save on memory as well as on debugging time, so you have a win-win situation. (use risk;? funny! ) I find that perl provides enough freedom as it is! :-D

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