Thread-killing, round 666 (was Re: Lisp mentality vs. Python mentality)

[Paul Rubin]

David Bolen <db3l.net at gmail.com> writes:
> I'm curious - do you know what happens if threading is implemented as
> a native OS thread and it's stuck in an I/O operation that is blocked?
> How does the Lisp interpreter/runtime gain control again in order to
> execute the specified function?  I guess on many POSIX-ish
> environments, internally generating a SIGALRM to interrupt a system
> operation might work, but it would likely have portability problems.

Someone wrote a paper proposing some Python language extensions to
support asynchronous exceptions in Python threads.  I don't have the
url handy but you can probably search for it.