[Python-ideas] With clauses for generator expressions

[Andrew Barnert]

From: Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>
Sent: Thu, November 15, 2012 10:05:36 PM


> As far as the given use-case is concerned:
> 
> upperlines =  (line.upper() for line in open('foo'))
> 
> I don't see what the concern is.  The file will remain open so long as the
> generator is not exhausted, but that  has to be the case no matter what you
> do. If the generator is thrown away  before being exhausted, the file will
> eventually be closed by the garbage  collector, if only when the application
> or script exits. For short-lived  scripts, the temporarily leakage of a file
> handle or two is hardly likely to  be a serious problem.
> 
> Presumably if you have a long-lived application  with many such opened
> files, you might risk running out of file handles when  running under Jython
> or IronPython. But I think that's a sufficiently unusual  and advanced use-
> case that I'm not worried that this is a problem that needs  solving with
> syntax instead of education.


This seems to be an argument against with statements, or any other kind of 
resource management at all besides "trust the GC". I'm pretty sure PEP 310, PEP 
340, PEP 343, and the discussion around them already had plenty of 
counter-arguments, but here's a couple quick ones: If you've opened a file for 
exclusive access (the default on Windows), you can't safely open it again if you 
can't predict when it will be closed. If the context in question is a mutex lock 
rather than a file open, you can't safely lock it again if you can't predict 
when it will be released (and, even if you never want to lock it again, you 
could end up deadlocked against another thread that does).