Why would you ever implement finalize()?

Question

I\'ve been reading through a lot of the rookie Java questions on finalize() and find it kind of bewildering that no one has really made it plain that finalize()

Answer 1

I'm not sure what you can make of this, but...

itsadok@laptop ~/jdk1.6.0_02/src/
$ find . -name "*.java" | xargs grep "void finalize()" | wc -l
41

So I guess the Sun found some cases where (they think) it should be used.