On Mon, 08 Oct 2007 04:06:55 +0000, Michele Simionato wrote: > > Hmmm... I'm not sure I understand how a with statement is meant to > > replace class.__del__ in practice. It seems to me that the two things > > have different uses. with is useful when you create an object, do > > something with it, dispose of it in an orderly fashion, and then > > continue. How does that help when you create an unknown number of > > long-lasting objects where you can't predict how and when they will be > > disposed of?
[snip] >> Now, I don't think the above is feasible. What am I missing? > > Rename your __del__ to close and call it explicitely: > > p.close() > alist[3].close() > alist[853].close() > alist[701].close() Well, that utterly sucks. If I wanted to call finalizers explicitly, I'd be writing in C. You say that using __del__ leads to hard-to-debug "bombs in my code waiting to explode at some unknown moment". Maybe so -- but so does explicitly managing resources by hand in the way you suggest, and quite frankly, I suspect I'd have a hell of a lot fewer bugs by relying on __del__ and the garbage collector than I would from managing resources manually in a big project. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
