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:

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Answer 1

It is more common in languages with deterministic garbage collection and without RAII, such as the old Visual Basic, but even there it's unnecessary and there it was often necessary to break cyclic references. So possibly it really stems from bad C++ programmers who use dumb pointers all over the place. In C++, it makes sense to set dumb pointers to 0 after deleting them to prevent double deletion.

Answer 2

I've seen this a lot in VBScript code (classic ASP) and I think it comes from there.