From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2002-07-02T03:35:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby implementation Q's

On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 02:54:00AM +0900, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> Ruby's finalization is kept very primitive intentionally.  It's not
> for everybody.  Some classes implement optional (or explicit) destroy
> mechanism, for example:
> 
>   a = open("/dev/null", "w")
>   a.print "foo"
>   a.close
>   a.print "bar"         # => exception! "closed stream"

Also note that this isn't exception-safe, since a doesn't get closed if
the first a.print raises an exception.  The idiomatic way to do this in
Ruby is using blocks.

Explicit destruction is almost never a good idea, since it's far too
easy to forget or to create a code path that happens to skip
destruction.

Paul