I have been dabbling in Python for a while now. One of the things that really appeals to me is that I can seem to be able to use C++-style RAII idioms to deal with resource management issues.
For those that have no idea what I am talking about (I learn a lot reading posts on subjects in which I am clueless), consider the following code snippet: for line in file(name): ..print line, This is nice and clean because I don't have to worry about cleaning up after myself. If I can't rely on the destructor for the file object to close the file, I must write the code like this: file_obj = file(name) for line in file_obj: ..print line, file_obj.close() not nearly as nice. Depending on the type of work you do, this can be no problem or a major headache when exceptions are thrown into the mix. Python objects have destructors so it seems that the original intent was to support deterministic destruction (destructors are not very useful in most GC'ed languages since you never know when or even if they will be called). The problem is that other implementations of Python (Jython and IronPython) do not support deterministic destruction. So we are left with a problem: is deterministic destruction an implementation detail of CPython that can go away at anytime, or is it an official property of the language. Giving up deterministic destruction in Python would be a real blow for me, since it is one of its unique features among GC'ed languages. So what's the deal, can I rely on it in "mainstream" Python or am I out of luck here? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
