From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.2 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,73bdb823e1c1f689 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Tom Moran Subject: Re: idiom for task termination? Date: 1997/02/09 Message-ID: <32FE308B.251D@bix.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 217644614 references: <32FA10EF.32A@bix.com> content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii organization: InterNex Information Services 1-800-595-3333 mime-version: 1.0 reply-to: tmoran@bix.com newsgroups: comp.lang.ada x-mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (Win95; I) Date: 1997-02-09T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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.