"Much Ado About Nothing"

[ChrisGreaves]

I have just finished re-reading Mark Hurst's Excellent Article and thought to post a link here.

If you are at my level, allow ten minutes to digest it, and don't read it last thing at night.

Here's a typical VB urban myth that crops up again and again in newsgroups:
You should always set object variables to Nothing when you're finished with them.

[HansV]

I think this urban myth originated in a very real problem in Microsoft Access: there is or was a bug where objects of type Recordset were not destroyed at the end of a procedure if they were not set to Nothing explicitly. This had strange side effects, such as Access refusing to quit even though the database had been closed. So many programmers adopted the habit of always setting ALL object variables to Nothing, even in situations where there was no need to. In time, they forgot the original reason and it became an absolute imperative...

[ChrisGreaves]

... were not destroyed at the end of a procedure if they were not set to Nothing explicitly.

I believe you.
I found Mark Hurst's article interesting because, if I've understood it, "nothing" is not what we think it is.
It is a very real "something".
I confess that for all this time I'd thought Set obj = Nothing meant that I was destroying the object, as in deleting the symbol table entry, freeing up memory and returning it to the pool, etc etc.

"You should now realise, of course, that assigning Nothing to a pointer variable doesn't necessarily result in the object's destruction since all it does is decrement the reference count."