with statement and standard library

[Robert Kern]

On 2010-02-19 01:18 AM, nobrowser wrote:
> Hi.  The with statement is certainly nifty.  The trouble is, the
> *only* two documented examples how it can be used with the library
> classes are file objects (which I use all the time) and thread locks
> which I almost never use.  Yet there are many, many classes in the
> library whose use would be more elegant and readable if the with
> statement could be employed.  Start with the connection objects in
> httplib and you can probably come up with 10 others easily.

Yup. I believe that the devs wanted to adopt the new feature carefully and 
deliberately, though. They introduced it for file objects and locks first 
because those were the use cases that had been thoroughly explored in the 
development of the PEP. They held back from making every reasonable object a 
context manager in order to see how the new feature worked in the real world 
with those two use cases first.

Now is probably a good time to start adding more sensible context managers to 
objects. I don't think there is any particular organized effort to do so, though.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco