You mean, how can that be replaced with ordinary operators? If you have multiple return's, move your 'finally' block to a separate function and call it before every 'return'.

I have never been able to use the finally block. I have yet to see an example where you would want to use it.

In languages with implicit construction/destruction facility, like C++, you'd probably live happily without the finally block. There are however situations in C++ when you want to create a class with ctor/dtor only to make sure some block is executed when going out of scope, no matter how. That dtor would be your finally block.

Indeed - once I discovered __del__ in Python, I immediately started to do it that way instead.

any kind of cleanup -- especially releasing locks/other shared resources, and also closing sockets, files, memory, etc.