Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Getting Started:
Object-oriented Programming

Managing the object life-cycle

You are responsible for the lifetime of a class instance. You must delete the object when it is no longer needed. If the variable used to hold the object reference obtained from the NEW statement goes out of scope and the object has not been deleted, the object remains in memory even though there is no reference to the object. This can lead to a potential memory leak, as it can with any other dynamically created objects in Progress.

Therefore, as long as you need the object, you must also ensure that you maintain an object reference to that object. You can always assign the object reference to another variable before it goes out of scope or pass it to another procedure, where you can continue to manage the object until you finally delete it.