[Python-ideas] Thread stopping

[Guido van Rossum]

Perhaps off-topic, but the one thing that isn't easy to do is stopping
a thread that's blocked (perhaps forever) in some blocking operation
-- e.g. acquiring a lock that's been forgotten or a read on a
malfunctioning socket (it happens!). Having to code those operations
consistently with timeouts is a pain, so if there was a way to make
those system calls return an error I'd really like that.

I'm not super worried about skipping finally-clauses, we can figure
out a hack for that.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)