Where did variable = null as “object destroying” come from?

Question

Working on a number of legacy systems written in various versions of .NET, across many different companies, I keep finding examples of the following pattern:

pub         


        

Answer 1

Consider a slight modification:

public void FooBar() 
{ 
    object foo = null; 
    object bar = null; 

    try 
    { 
       foo = new object(); 
       bar = new object(); 

       // Code which throws exception. 
    } 
    finally 
    { 
       // Destroying objects 
       foo = null; 
       bar = null; 
    } 
    vavoom(foo,bar);
} 

The author(s) may have wanted to ensure that the great Vavoom (*) did not get pointers to malformed objects if an exception was previously thrown and caught. Paranoia, resulting in defensive coding, is not necessarily a bad thing in this business.

(*) If you know who he is, you know.