How To Keep Track Of Instances Of Python Objects In A Reliable Way?

I would like to be able to keep track of instances of geometric Point objects in order to know what names are already 'taken' when automatically naming a new one. For instance, if

Solution 1:

Don't try to track available names based on all Point objects that exist in the entire program. Predicting what objects will exist and when objects will cease to exist is difficult and unnecessary, and it will behave very differently on different Python implementations.

First, why are you trying to enforce Point name uniqueness at all? If, for example, you're drawing a figure in some window and you don't want two points with the same label in the same figure, then have the figure track the points in it and reject a new point with a taken name. This also makes it easy to explicitly remove points from a figure, or have two figures with independent point names. There are a number of other contexts where a similar explicit container object may be reasonable.

If these are free-floating points not attached to some geometry environment, then why name them at all? If I want to represent a point at (3.5, 2.4), I don't care whether I name it A or B or Bob, and I certainly don't want a crash because some other code somewhere halfway across the program decided to call their point Bob too. Why do names or name collisions matter?

I don't know what your use case is, but for most I can imagine, it'd be best to either only enforce name uniqueness within an explicit container, or not enforce name uniqueness at all.