On Tuesday 08 March 2005 11:33, Ville-Pertti Keinonen wrote:
> I'm not sure I understand Jon Harrop's concern about using resources
> after they've been deallocated.  This has been addressed in the obvious
> way (return errors for operations on remaining references) in various
> languages for decades, and unlike memory management and type errors,
> AFAIK hasn't been a major source of bugs or complaints.

A great deal of effort has been put into writing static verifiers to ensure 
correct use, in order to remove this class of run-time errors. So I think 
this is unquestionably a source of bugs.

Could it not be said that having a GC is a way to avoid such errors in the 
context of memory allocation and deallocation?

On Tuesday 08 March 2005 13:07, Damien Doligez wrote:
> On Mar 7, 2005, at 18:10, Jon Harrop wrote:
> > I believe that OCaml guarantees to close your files at least upon program
> > termination,
>
> OCaml does no such thing.  The OS does.

Yipes! In that case I take back what I said before and agree with Stefan - it 
is sloppy coding style to not explicitly close a file.

That seems most odd though. Is this for historical reasons - closing files was 
added long before object finalisers?

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
Objective CAML for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists