On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 1:40 PM, Donn Cave
The use of withFile on the main function is a good practice in Haskell only because of this defect in the GHC library implementation.
Well, I've always closed my handles on all languages I've programmed. Actually, now I remember that some students were bitten by the same bug in Pascal.
There's no question, if there were two competing Haskell library implementations, GHC and one that worked like buffered I/O in other languages, which one would better support Haskell programmers. It's too bad that doesn't qualify it as "valid" bug.
Having this feature may be nice if you ever forget to close your handles. But if this is a good practice or not is an orthogonal issue. (Actually it is a non-issue because only one of the practices work today =P). Cheers, -- Felipe.