[Python-3000] python-safethread project status

[Greg Ewing]

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.

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.

-- 
Greg