Chapter 10. Object Destruction

In the previous two chapters, we looked at basic object creation and manipulation. In this chapter, we'll look at an equally important topic: what happens when objects go away.

As you saw in Chapter 4, when the last reference to a Perl data structure goes away, Perl automatically reclaims the memory of that data structure, including destroying any links to other data. Of course, that in turn may cause other ("contained") structures to be destroyed as well.