🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul30.162753.11173@athena.mit.edu> wwinston@athena.mit.edu (R. Whitney Winston) writes:
>How can I remove an instance?

In general, you can't.  This is Lisp, and unused objects are removed
automatically by the garbage collector.  If your objects aren't going away,
either there's a problem with your GC or you've still got references to the
objects you claim you don't need.

A possible solution, though, is to use "resources".  These are collections
of similar objects that are made available for reuse when they're no longer
needed instead of becoming garbage.  Some Common Lisp implementations
(Symbolics, Lucid, probably Franz) provide them as an extension; if you're
using an implementation that doesn't, it's pretty easy to write yourself
(there may even have been an article in a past issue of Lisp Pointers that
discussed them and provided an implementation).

-- 
Barry Margolin
System Manager, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com          {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar