question about internals

hi all,

I'm developing a fortran 77 binding to gdome2. You can find it at

http://members.ferrara.linux.it/munehiro/f77xml/

The problem is quite tricky. Unfortunately Fortran compilers and platform are 
so variegate that the concept of pointer is very particular. To prevent 
messing up with architecture specific problems, and also to face the problem 
to unref the instances at the closing of the file, my current f77xml 
implementation store each reference to nodes, nodelists and so on in a cache, 
and returns an integer that refers to the cache position. 

My question arise from the problem that the same element _can_ have two 
different insertions in the cache, so you can refer to the same element with 
two different numbers. Also, if you empty the cache, thus unref'ing every 
element, a new get of the same element has a different number associated to.
Doing some experiment with gdome2 in C, i noted that even ref'ing, then 
unref'ing and the ref'ing again the element, or accessing in different ways 
(from its parent or its child), the pointer that is returned is always the 
same. Is this consistence guaranteed by the DOM implementation of gdome, or 
it's simply a consequence of the small example i'm running? I tried to browse 
the sources, and as far as i understood the element is completely freed every 
time the refcount fall to zero, then subsequents access to the same node can 
return, in principle, a different memory pointer. If The refcount never fall 
to zero, the node is always referred with the same pointer, regardless the 
way used to obtain it.

last question: if i obtain a nodelist, when unref'ing it the referred nodes 
are automatically unrefferred (refCount--) ?

thanks