does python have useless destructors?

[Tim Bradshaw]

dkturner at telkomsa.net (David Turner) wrote in message news:<e251b7ba.0406100011.39a795e1 at posting.google.com>...
>
> This makes me sad.  But there is some hope in the following pattern,
> although it can be quite awkward:
> 
> def with_file(fname, mode, oper):
>     f = open(fname, mode);
>     try:
>         oper()
>     finally:
>         f.close()
> 
> Of course, this can very quickly turn your code into so much
> functional goo.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, as Lisp
> programmers can attest...  But it's still not quite as powerful as
> RAII.

No Lisp programmer worth their salt would tolerate such a horror.  In
the specific case above there's already an idiom for doing this in
Common Lisp:

(with-open-file (s fname ...)
  ...)

In the general case of cleanup actions, a decent Lisp programmer would
rapidly create their own idiom (arguably CL should provide a
higher-level cleanup framework as implementing the idiom correctly is
not completely simple).  Mine is called LET/FINALIZING:

(let/finalizing ((s (open fname ...)))
  ...)

Is the same as the above WITH-OPEN-FILE incantation, but can be
generalised to any object which may need finalizing.  You simply need
to tell the system how to finalize the object, either by defining a
suitable method on a generic function, or even at the site of use if
you only plan on doing it in one place:

(let/finalizing ((s (make-lock ...)
                     ;; Call-specific finalizer
                    #'(lambda (l abortp)
                         (when abortp (warn "Whoops"))
                         ;; and punt to the global one
                         (finalize-thing l abortp))))
  ...)

--tim