Searching equivalent to C++ RAII or deterministic destructors

[Peter Otten]

Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:

> Bearophile wrote:
>> Ulrich Eckhardt:
>>> a way to automatically release the resource, something
>>> which I would do in the destructor in C++.
>> 
>> Is this helpful?
>> http://effbot.org/pyref/with.htm
> 
> Yes, it aims in the same direction. However, I'm not sure this applies to
> my case. The point is that the resource handle is not just used locally in
> a restricted scope but it is allocated and stored. The 'with' is something
> that makes sense in the context of mutex locking, where you have a
> well-defined critical section. 

Isn't that exactly what RAII does?

> What I need is something similar to open(),
> which returs a file. When the last reference to that object goes out of
> scope, the underlying file object is closed.

You can go ahead and implement a __del__() method. It will often work in 
CPython, but you get no guarantees, especially when you have reference 
cycles and with other Python implementations that don't use refcounting.

Peter