Could Emacs be rewritten in Python?

[Alexander Schmolck]

Robin Munn <rmunn at pobox.com> writes:

> Paul Foley <see at below.invalid> wrote:
> > On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 16:50:40 GMT, Robin Munn wrote:
> > 
> >> What I really want to know is why you would consider sample #1 "broken
> >> and fragile code". I can't think of any circumstances where sample #1
> >> would fail to achieve its desired effect. Can you?
> > 
> > What if another thread (B) does the same thing, and changes sys.stdout
> > while this thread (A) is still inside the "try" block?  And if thread
> > A runs its "finally" clause and resets sys.stdout while thread B is
> > still in its "try" block, they screw each other.
> 
> This is the classic problem that arises when two threads need to use any
> shared resource, isn't it? I wasn't considering threads at all when I
> wrote those two code samples, so of course I didn't use locks to ensure
> good behavior.
> 
> Actually, now that I start thinking about it, any kind of
> save-and-restore mechanism would start to get pretty hairy around
> threads, wouldn't it? 

Yes and that's why dynamic variables *do* make a real difference: different
threads don't have to share the same global variable.

'as