On 12/28/2005 9:50 AM, Seth Falcon wrote:
> On 27 Dec 2005, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>>This is a bug in load, isn't it? load() opens the connection but
>>doesn't close it.
>
>
> Well, it may be that load needs a small fix, but that doesn't fix
> anonymous connections in general, IMO.
No it doesn't. However, I've committed the small fix.
>
> The loop could easily have been:
>
> for (i in 1:50) {
> print(load(url(testUrl, open="r")))
> }
>
> And it doesn't need to be related to url or load:
>
> cat("a line of text\n", file="another-example.txt")
> z <- NULL
> for (i in 1:50) {
> z <- c(z, readLines(file("another-example.txt", open="r")))
> }
>
> Also, connections are "in use" even if they are closed:
>
> for (i in 1:50) {
> if (isOpen(file("another-example.txt")))
> stop("you will not get here")
> }
I think the general problem is that R doesn't have references (or at
least, they aren't in a final, documented state). If the garbage
collector closed a connection, then things would go wrong when there
were two copies of it: the second one would be messed up when the first
was destroyed. If we had references, then opening a connection could
create a connection object and a reference to it; the connection object
would remain as long as there were any references to it, and could be
destroyed (and automatically closed) after the last reference was gone.
Duncan Murdoch
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