Why del cursor/row objects of ArcPy?

Can someone help me understand what the last 2 lines of this code does:

import arcpy
arcpy.env.workspace = "c:/esripress/python/data/exercise07"
arcpy.env.overwriteOutput = True


copy = arcpy.CopyFeatures_management("airports.shp","Results/airports.shp")
fc = "Results/airports.shp"

cursor = arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(fc, ["STATE"], ' "STATE" <> \'AK\'')
for row in cursor:
    row[0] = "AK"
    cursor.updateRow(row)
del row
del cursor

I understand that the loop function goes through each record that does not have a value of 'AK' and gives that record a value of "AK". But what I don't understand is what the del row and del cursor are meant to do.

Answer

Those are relics of an earlier style of arcpy cursors. del row, cursor were previously used to clean-up after the script was run by deleting the row and cursor objects. Now, the proper usage is to wrap the cursor in a with statement, which both opens and closes the row and cursor objects, as follows:

import arcpy
arcpy.env.workspace = "c:/esripress/python/data/exercise07"
arcpy.env.overwriteOutput = True

copy = arcpy.CopyFeatures_management("airports.shp","Results/airports.shp")
fc = "Results/airports.shp"


with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(fc, ["STATE"], ' "STATE" <> \'AK\'') as cursor:
    for row in cursor:
        row[0] = "AK"
        cursor.updateRow(row)