Remi Turk
Hm, I'm not sure about the "should". Garbage collection is meant for memory, and anything making that less clear makes people more likely to depend on incorrect assumptions. And redefining GC to be a collection of _all_ garbage, instead of just memory doesn't sound so fantastic either.
I would not be surprised if relying on GC to close open files would be generally considered kosher in a few years - in cases when it has little visible effects outside, i.e. excluding network connections, but including reading configuration files. All which is needed is that the OS doesn't run out of system-wide resources when only a given process opens many files; and that the language implementation can actually force a garbage collection and run finalizers of file objects immediately in the rare case when the limit of per-process descriptors is reached. Well, this has some impact on mixing languages, because when a module implemented in one language runs out of file descriptors, it should cause a program-wide GC of all runtimes. Maybe this style would apply only to environments like .NET. -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk \__/ qrczak@knm.org.pl ^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/