Paul Rubin wrote: > Dan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Is this discouraged?: > > > > for line in open(filename): > > <do something with line> > > Yes. > > > Can I count on the ref count going to zero to close the file? > > You really shouldn't. It's a CPython artifact.
I disagree, somewhat. No, you shouldn't count on the "ref count" per se going to 0. And you shouldn't count on the file object being GC'd _immediately_ after the last reference is destroyed. You should be able to rely on it being GC'd at some point in the not-horribly-distant future, though. Doing an explicit .close() is not normally useful and muddies the code (and introduces more lines for potential bugs to infest). And yes, I know that the language spec technically allows for no GC at all--it's a QOI issue, not a spec issue, but any implementation that didn't GC would be useless as a general Python platform (perhaps useful for specific embedded uses, but programming for such an environment would be different from programming for rational python platforms in bigger ways than this). (And personally I think the benefits to programmers of guaranteeing ref-counting semantics would outweigh the additional headaches for Jython and other alternative implementations). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
