[Python-Dev] Where to put the interrupt module?

[Guido van Rossum]

> In that past, there have been a few times where it would have been
> very convenient to terminate/signal another thread by posting an
> exception to it.  Using KeyboardInterrupt to do so is okay, although
> it seems like something of a kludge.

This gets into the general discussion about whether threads should be
stoppable.

Also, this mechanism can *only* interrupt the main thread.  (That's
even true of the more generalized version you were thinking of.)

> Code that gives special status to KeyboardInterrupt doesn't worry me
> at all. What I am wary of is code that is not written to be
> exception safe in the presence of unexpected exceptions (not just
> asynchronous ones).  The example I was working on yesterday involved
> KeyboardInterrupts generated from an SSL socket in httplib's SSL
> readline method.  A keyboard interrupt will result in data read from
> the socket and then stored in a local variable to be lost. Of
> course, this error wasn't very likely before I patched the SSL
> module to check for interrupts, but that is beside the point.

That's a problem that'll always remain.

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