>I did indeed miss the thread before, thanks for reposting it. Frankly it's far too much work to go through. And if you ran through all the possible places objects can be lying around and recursed through their containership hierarchy you could probably get something working.

I also almost forgot it, but when you said a Reference[] collection would be handy to have around, I remembered this was something which may be used to build one. But, since AInstance() doesn't catch anything except var=createobj() (and probably Do Form ... Linked to a single variable), this method is pretty useless. The other way would be a global object seeker, which would be just an overkill - a sequential or any kind of search through all the possible objects is just plain too much.

>If you are in development and want to get rid of everything CLEAR ALL or Alt-F+X does a wonderful job of taking out the garbage. *LOL*

:) Just like a 9mm cures headache.

>I can't ever see the need for anything remotely like Jim's wishlist item in a deployed app. Where the programmer has properly cleaned up their object references.

In production sure no need for that, but in development his way (i.e. a release of a reference releases object itself) would be probably easier to debug. Any stranded reference would become .null. but would do no harm. Hanging references would either be .null. if the object is released while it's still needed, or they'd sleep harmlessly until QUIT. Trying out such a thing, we'd simply run across a .null. reference, and start looking for the idiot who released the object prematurely.

A real thing would be to have, of course, the this.references[] collection, and it should, IMO, keep the _names_ of the variables/members/properties which are referencing it. I can imagine nice chaos if this.references[] kept references. Nice recursive chaos :).

For as long as this thread continues, I'm coming to the conclusion that this.references[] is not simply protected from programmer's touch, but that it simply doesn't exist. The only backlink from the object to the variables referencing it is the reference count. The object itself is happily unaware of any variables/others referencing it. Maybe some insider may shed some light on this matter.