file.close()

[Erik Max Francis]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

> Hallvard B Furuseth fed this fish to the penguins on Friday 25 July
> 2003 12:51 pm:
> 
> > Um.  Explicit close does raise an exception if it fails, right?
> 
	...
>         Looks like it doesn't care... As long as the file /had/ been
> opened
> first (doesn't look like the interactive interpreter collected f until
> the del either).

I don't think you've demonstrated that; all you've shown is that builtin
Python file objects make file closing idempotent.  You haven't
demonstrated a case where there actually is an I/O error that occurs
when .close gets called.  In particular, I _really_ don't know what you
meant to show with this snippet, as it really has nothing to do with
files at all:

> >>> f
> <closed file 't.t', mode 'w' at 0x809dc88>
> >>> del f
> >>> f.close()
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> NameError: name 'f' is not defined

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