Why no try-except-finally ?

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

"KefX" <keflimarcusx at aol.comNOSPAM> wrote in message
news:20031105040556.29079.00000209 at mb-m22.aol.com...


> this idiom unPythonic somehow? (The nested-try thing does look odd...) Or
is it
> the way we're supposed to do it? Or is there something I'm missing?

According to the documentation the purpose of a try...finally statement is
to ensure that aquired ressources will be freed again as in

self.lock.acquire()
try:
    ..do whatever we are supposed to do;
    ...it may fail here or in a different module etc.
    ...exceptions may be caught or not
finally:
    ...but we always end *here*
    ...and uncaught exceptions are re-raised from here too (i think)
    ...so that "the right thing" happens
    self.lock.release()

so that the ressource is released regardless of any exceptions etc. that
happens between the try: and the finally:

The separation is probably because the purpose of try..finally is different
from exception handling and mixing the two would obscure that (or maybe
there is some wizardry under the hood).