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[Salman Khilji <address@hidden>]

Following up my previous post, I am looking at the reference counting 
mechanism.  I suppose I am neglecting something because I fail to undersand 
one thing.

Teh reference count is incremented in the constructor and the equality 
operator and decremented in the destructor of abstract_struct and 
concrete_struct.

When the reference count drops to 0, the object in question is deleted.  Why 
do we do this?  Notice that to decrement the reference, the destructor must 
be called.  The only way to call the destructor is to call delete on the 
object.  If you have to delete to object by calling delete on the object, 
then why have reference counting in the first place?

I am thinking about that for "my own copy" of TeXmacs, I would get rid of 
basic.hh and remove all the reference counting mechnism.  Would I break 
anything by doing this?  basic.hh has lots of preprocessor generated code 
some of which I haven't looked at close enough.  But I think getting rid of 
macros like "CONCRETE_NULL" would definitely make the code easier to 
understand.



Salman