Which is why I gave my example of how I thought "with" would look like in Ruby (as it turns out I missed some exception handling in order for it to be equivalen

Which is why I gave my example of how I thought "with" would look like in Ruby (as it turns out I missed some exception handling in order for it to be equivalent to the Python version in functionality). What you can't do, though, is express ruby's blocks using python's with statement; ruby is strictly more powerful here. One simple example of this is ruby's fork statement, which runs the code in the block in a process of its own: fork { puts "child" } puts "parent" That will print "child" and "parent" once each, and it works because the fork method has control over the block's execution, so it can choose to only evaluate the block in the child's context. In python, the approximate code would be: with fork(): print 'child' print 'parent' However, python doesn't allow the resource to control block execution, so this code can't work (within standard python; there's a bytecode hack that can make it work, but that's outside the spec). Anyhow, I guess we've diverged pretty hard from the article, but I can never pass up the opportunity to vent against python's with statement.