[Python-3000] python-safethread project status

[Guido van Rossum]

[catching up on old threads]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 5:47 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Adam Olsen wrote:
>  > I'd tend to assume only *purely* functional languages should have
>  > asynchronous interrupts.  Any imperative language with them is
>  > suspect.
>
>  Yet there are situations where *not* having any such thing
>  can be extremely inconvenient.
>
>  If I'm performing some background calculation that only
>  munges on its own data, and doesn't touch anything shared,
>  it's quite safe to kill it at any point and throw away
>  everything it was working on.

Maybe it should be a forked subprocess then, if it doesn't touch
anything shared?

>  Being unable to do that from outside means that I have
>  to sprinkle explicit tests through it for an abort flag,
>  which is a horrible thing to have to do from a software
>  engineering standpoint for many reasons.
>
>  In the consenting-adults environment of Python, I don't
>  like having a useful facility withheld from me just
>  because it's possible to misuse it.

Huh? We do that all the time. We won't let you control when memory is
deallocated. We won't let you call __hash__ when you've overridden
__eq__ but not __hash__; there are zillions of examples.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)