On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 19:15, Branko Čibej <br...@xbc.nu> wrote: >... > Explicit management of rare resources is no bad thing. The "with" > statement was introduced specifically to do away with the flaky, three > times longer try-except-else that would otherwise be necessary in order > to guarantee that file objects are closed.
With the prior constructions: open(foo).read() open(foo, 'w').write(bar) If one of those .read() or .write() calls fails, *and* somebody does not clear the traceback... then yeah. A file remains open, referenced from the traceback. But somebody has to be explicitly *keeping* those tracebacks. I've never seen code where people keep lists of tracebacks. I cannot even speculate on why somebody might use svn.fs, capture tracebacks, hold onto them, and then *continue* trying to use svn.fs. Switching to: with open(foo) as f: f.read() You're going from a single expression to a control flow construct, simply to try and avoid a situation that I doubt anybody could even begin to argue would come up. > And yes, the CPython docs do say that file objects are closed when their > refcount reaches zero, but also state that one shouldn't rely on that. > Also see the second stanza in PEP 20. :) Ha! And the third stanza says "Simple is better than complex." > There's no call to jump all over people because you don't agree with > their coding style. If you call that "jump[ing] all over people", then I think you're taking it wrong. I'm providing review feedback where I see a simple construction being turned into something more complicated. Cheers, -g
