What is the point of finally in a try catch/except finally statement
I have used try-catch/except-finally variants in many languages for years, today someone asked me what is the point of finally and I couldn't answer.
Basically why would you put a statement in finally instead of just putting it after the whole try-catch block? Or in other words is there a difference between the following blocks of code:
try{ //a}
catch {//b}
finally {//c}
try{//a}
catch{//b}
//c
EDIT:
PEOPLE, I know what finally does, I have been using it for ages, but my question is in the above example putting //c
in finally seems redundant, doesn't it?
The purpose of a finally
block is to ensure that code gets run in three circumstances which would not very cleanly be handled using "catch" blocks alone:
- If code within the
try
block exits viareturn
- If code within a
catch
block either rethrows the caught exception, or--accidentally or intentionally--ends up throwing a new one. - If the code within the
try
block encounters an exception which for which thetry
has nocatch
.
One could copy the finally
code before every return
or throw, and wrap catch
blocks within their own try/catch to allow for the possibility of an accidental exception occurring, but it's far easier to forgo all that and simply use a finally
block.
BTW, one thing I wish language designers would include would be an exception
argument to the finally
block, to deal with the case where one needs to clean up after an exception but still wants it to percolate up the call stack (e.g. one could wrap the code for a constructor in such a construct, and Dispose
the object under construction if the constructor was going to exit with an exception).
Finally block is executed even if an exception thrown in the try block. Therefore, for instance if you opened a stream before, you may want to close that stream either an exception is thrown or not. Finally block is useful for such an issue.