I assume you're talking about dynamic languages like Python or Ruby. It's common for underlying system characteristics to leak through the abstractions, so some

I assume you're talking about dynamic languages like Python or Ruby. It's common for underlying system characteristics to leak through the abstractions, so something like this isn't necessarily "handled". In CPython's case, as far as I can tell, it uses bare, unchecked close() calls, and just assumes they succeed. (It does, however, provide an interface for dealing with signals, and one of the capabilities, as of 2.6, is to specify whether system calls will restart. See some discussion on SA_RESTART elsewhere in these comments.)