[Python-3000] python-safethread project status

[Adam Olsen]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 6:47 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.
>
>  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.

Sorry, I wasn't clear.  I'm only opposed to using it as the default.
There certainly are cases that demand it and I do wish to provide it
for them.

I suspect it'll be more practical to keep usage to a bare minimum
where you can't sprinkle checks for the cancellation flag, but that
doesn't matter much at this point.


-- 
Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus