Should destructors be able to tell who called them?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:08:30 -0400, Lutger <lutger.blijdestijn at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> ...
>> This would make destructors a lot more useful.  Thoughts?
>>
>> -Steve
>
> My first thought was that they are actually two separate functions  
> distinguished
> by a boolean, then Michel also mentioned the SafeD argument.
>
> atm I think it is better to let go of the destructor entirely for  
> anything else
> than the GC collecting non-gc owned data as we now have. (the unsafe  
> version,
> not compilable in SafeD). Rather provide a standard interface to  
> implement and
> base deterministic release of resources on that. A much more simple  
> version of
> IDisposable. clear() can call this one and leave ~this alone.

Hm... something I just thought of that makes this bad, destructors are  
special in that they automatically call base destructors.  You can't do  
that with a simple function.

But it could be done the way you say (with the caveat that you have to  
manually call the base method).  I think clear should call ~this() in  
addition to the dispose method because you don't want to have to duplicate  
code.

-Steve