Re: idiom for task termination?

[Tom Moran <tmoran@bix.com>]

Wow, what a great fire and brimstone, show no mercy, cast the sinners
into the outer darkness, Sunday sermon!  I look forward to a great wave
of "repent and reform".
  In the meantime, however, I'm one of those craven sorts who'd rather
have users than moral superiority.  If I tell users of my package "if,
during debugging, you get an unhandled exception, use of my package will
cause the program to hang forever, and if you have the OS terminate it
you won't get any exception name or traceback" I would expect to have
few takers.
  I could tell the user "if you use my package you must be sure to
include a 'when others => toms.quit;' exception handler.  The original
question, though, was how can I use a task internal to a library package
without special demands on the user. In my experience, saying "but I
told you to do such and such and you failed to do it" is not a
successful approach to having satisfied users. There's also the problem
of some users having compilers which are unable to give exception
tracebacks.  It's been suggested that a mere log2(N) runs with various
breakpoint settings will give them a traceback, but this package runs in
an environment where the sequence and timing of external input would
have to be duplicated on each of those runs, which is inconvenient if
not impossible.