Why don't people like lisp?

[Ingvar Mattsson]

Bjorn Pettersen <bjorn.pettersen at comcast.net> writes:

> Raymond Wiker <Raymond.Wiker at fast.no> wrote in
> news:864qxz2if5.fsf at raw.grenland.fast.no: 
[ SNIP ]
> >         Note that reference-counting has problems with cyclic
> > references; probably not something that will bite you in the case of
> > open files, but definitely a problem you need to be aware of.
> 
> (a) true (by definition of cycle/ref.counting?)
> (b) no relevance to CPython (which uses a generational collector
>     to reclaim reference cycles [with the regular finalizer problems]).
> (c) why are open file objects special (are you saying objects with no
>     internal references are less likely to be reachable from a cycle,
>     or that there is something intrinsically special about (open?) files)?

Open file handles is a "scarce resource". It wasn't uncommon to have
an upper limit of 32, including strin, stdout and stderr, in older
unix environments. These days, 256 or 1024 seems to be more common
(default) upper limits. usually not a problem, but if one does a lot
of "open, write" and leave it for the GC to clean up, one *may* hit
resource starvation problems one wouldn't have hit, had teh file
handles been clsoed in a timely fashion.

//Ingvar
-- 
A routing decision is made at every routing point, making local hacks
hard to permeate the network with.