On Sun, 6 Mar 2005, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> > In most cases you probably won't care when a file is closed after writing to
> > it, so you can just rely on the garbage collector.
> 
> Very bad practice in (e.g.) an NFS world where the filesystem makes no
> guarantee about file writes until you actually close the file.

Ocaml does give you the close_out function to explicitly close an I/O 
stream.  Closing on GC collection just catches the odd cases, like exiting 
the function unexpected (via an exception, for example).

Brian