🚀 go-pugleaf

> Why do you feel a need to destroy instances explicitly?

I don't know why the original poster felt this need, but I
recently needed something in that general area, namely a way
to provide "finalization" code for when an instance was
freed by the garbage collector (or by me, I suppose).
A possible case might be a file: when I'm done with it, I
want it closed.  What I actually had was some instances
that were "handles" on objects held by another program
that I was communicating with via a pipe.  If a handle
was garbage collected, I wanted to tell the other program
to delete the corresponding object.

Some cases of this sort can be handled in the manner of
WITH-OPEN-FILE, but not all of them.

Now, one thing that didn't happen in X3J13's revision of Common
Lisp was changes to garbage collection to support such things 
as finalization and weak pointers.  I think it was reasonable
not to do this, but I want to add my voice to those saying
"we want it" in the hope that implementors will be influenced.

I'm not really sure finalization is a good idea though.

-- jd