On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, Dmitry Bely wrote:

> close() can fail (generate an exception). How are you going to handle it in
> the garbage collector? On the contrary, the memory deallocaton always
> succeeds.

Two choices: either abort the whole program (uncaught exception), or 
ignore it.  Ocaml's life is a little easier, as GC takes place inside the 
single thread of execution.  But I dislike making the language spec 
require that.  

Now, *which* of those two choices is "correct" is a matter for some 
debate.  Myself, I like aborting the whole program.

What I dislike is resource leaks- as plugging the holes manually can often
be tricky.  If I wanted to hand-manage resource deallocation, I'd be
programming in C (well, not quite- but the point is made).

-- 
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive,
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mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
                                - Gene Spafford 
Brian

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