Re: terminate applications

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

Interesting, but not compelling because it just plain isn't terribly 
useful to the end user. If I want a simple call to shoot the entire 
program in the head, I don't want to study the Suma Theologica for 
several years to figure out what programming sin I committed that is 
keeping it from doing the thing I want done. :-) If there is some 
Theoretical Purity that must be maintained to task abortion, then so be 
it. Give me a Ada.Kill ("-9") ; subprogram call that will do what I want 
it to do - kill the program regardless of what the rest of it may be doing.

All too often, Ada gets herself wrapped up in trying to maintain some 
sort of purity on some issue and totally forgets that someone out there 
needs a job done. Just like my desire to get saturated math gets shot 
down by those who insist its behavior is too ill defined for the 
standard. So what? Let it be ill defined. Its use in reality has 
beneficial effects as an error recovery mechanism. It gets used in 
reality all the time. All Ada succeeds in doing by maintaining this 
purity is to make itself less useful to the practitioner - who must now 
find some butt-ugly way around the problem.

MDC

Robert I. Eachus wrote:
> 
> 
> I don't see why it should. It is a level of abstraction problem.  If the 
> OS has threads that are "uninterruptable," that should be treated just 
> like an abort-deferred region in Ada.
> 
-- 
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Marin David Condic
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