Comment by zipfle

I think that the author is defining memory leaks as permanently out of scope but not deallocated memory. In that sense I don't know of anything in vanilla Python, or Java, that would qualify as a memory leak. In the more intuitive sense of a memory leak being any failure to make objects available to garbage collection, (such as by retaining references to them in an unexpected place) leading to unchecked increases in a program's memory footprint, memory leaks are possible in either language.