Joe Strout wrote:
A follow-up question here... is it really necessary to close things like
files in Python? I've been slumming it in the REALbasic community for
the last decade, where you generally don't worry about such things, as
any object that represents something "open" will automatically "close"
itself when it dies (and since a closed object in those cases is
useless, I'd rather not have it around after it's closed anyway). Is the
same true in Python, or do we need to explicitly close things?
Implementation dependent. (Because it depends on what kind
of garbage collection or object finalisation happens). Like
most people, I imagine, in ad-hoc code I'll just do things
like:
<code
import csv
writer = csv.writer (open ("data.csv", "wb"))
writer.writerow (['blah', blah'])
</code>
If I exit the interpreter here, I'm pretty much safe.
But if I add os.startfile ("data.csv"), I'll likely
get nothing or a file lock.
I believe that in other implementations -- Jython,
for example -- you cannot rely on the file closing
itself.
In general in posting public code, especially to
newcomers, I make the effort to use a try-finally
or a with statement.
TJG
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
