Regarding exception handling

[Bryan]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> "Bryan" wrote
> 
> 
>>the above is not the same. make the a = ... raise an exception and you'll see the difference.
>>
>>s = ... #
>>a = 1/0
>>s.close()
>>
>>as you can see, s.close() will never be called.  also, in this example, i intentionally didn't put 
>>the extra try/except around the try/finally statement.
> 
> 
> file handles and sockets are closed when the objects are garbage collected.
> under CPython, they're usually closed when they go out of scope.
> 
> using try/finally on files and sockets are usually overkill.
> 
> </F> 
> 
> 
> 

i was trying to be generic and use the term resource.  i know you are correct 
about file handles and sockets. there are other resources that don't behave so 
nicely.  i'm currently using a third party module that will crash python (the 
entire interpreter GPF's) if you don't explicitly close the resource before your 
python script exits.  other times, depending on a variable to go out of scope to 
  have a resource automically close itself is not practical.  or sometimes you 
want a resource to be closed, but still hold on to the reference.   so, i don't 
feel as strongly as you do that try/finally on even files and socks are 
overkill.  of course on small scripts, i don't use try/finally or close() either :)

bryan