From: Alex Martelli [mailto:aleax@aleax.it]

On Sunday 02 February 2003 10:49 pm, Paul Moore wrote: ...

...

which I've been referring to as acquire/release. The only property-like cases I'm aware of are properties themselves.

Wouldn't classmethods and staticmethods also be able to exploit (in a simpler way) the syntax/semantics used for properties? That's the impression I had.

Classmethods and staticmethods are already covered by the patch to allow def myfn(f) [staticmethod]: ... I don't see any value in looking further than this, as I think that this syntax is clean, extensible, and understandable.

I do like your "unified proposal" for the "with" case (I have no idea if "with" is the pluperfectly right sugar for this, btw -- no biggie anyway, i think).

...

the exception should be propogated. The problem is that I'm not sure what is the best way for an __except__ method to signal that it caught the exception.

Maybe the return value of __except__ should be evaluated in a boolean context encoding this? False -> exception not caught, True -> caught ...

So, an __except__ without return statements (implicitly returning None, thus false) would be a clean-up thingy that does no catching (but e.g. just rollbacks some DB transactions or whatever), for example -- a "return True" would explicitly signal the exception was caught -- etc.

Yes, that sounds exactly right - thanks! This was one of the options I was thinking about, but I hadn't convinced myself that an __except__ with no return did something which felt right. But your explanation convinces me. Paul.