5.5 Stream classes

5.5.2 Closing streams

It is important to call close on streams when you have finished with them. Typically, external streams such as <file-stream> and <console-stream> allocate underlying system resources when they are created, and these resources are not recovered until the stream is closed. The total number of such streams that can be open at one time may be system dependent. It may be possible to add reasonable finalization methods to close streams when they are no longer referenced but these are not added by default. See the Core Features and Mathematics manual for full details about finalization.