Andy Freeman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Compare that with what a programmer using Python 2.4 has to do if > she'd like the functionality provided by 2.5's with statement. Yes, > with is "just syntax", but it's extremely useful syntax, syntax that > can be easily implemented with lisp-style macros.
Not really. The with statement's binding targets all have to support the protocol, which means a lot of different libraries need redesign. You can't do that with macros. Macros can handle some narrow special cases such as file-like objects, handled in Python with contextlib.closing. That said, the with statement was missing from Python for much too long, since users were happy to rely on reference counting. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
