"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 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.
Is there something in the language specification that says I should be able to rely on something like that? In Jython, for example, I think GC is handled totally by the underlying JVM and therefore totally up to the Java implementation. > Doing an explicit .close() is not normally useful and muddies the code > (and introduces more lines for potential bugs to infest). Yes, the "with" statement is the right way to do it. > 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 QOI? > didn't GC would be useless as a general Python platform (perhaps useful GC's typically track memory allocation but not file handle allocation. If you're opening a lot of files, you could run out of fd's before the GC ever runs. > (And personally I think the benefits to programmers of guaranteeing > ref-counting semantics would outweigh the additional headaches for > Jython and other alternative implementations). Yes, "with" (doing an implicit close guaranteed to happen at the right time) takes care of it properly. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
