Re: terminate applications

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

O.K. but that is just making a case for why we need a library of common 
stuff outside of the ARM. I'll agree that there are all sorts of useful 
things that are difficult to specify to a sufficient level of detail to 
make them suitable for an ISO standard. But if the alternative is to say 
"Go roll your own..." or "You can find that in one or more of fifty 
libraries lying around the internet somewhere..." then I think it is 
unacceptable. You want to know that the code you wrote is making a call 
to something that will be supported in some fashion on most platforms by 
most compilers without having to make source code changes.

If we had a conventional library ("Provisional Standard" was the name 
suggested by Dr. Leif, but I'm willing to call it anything the community 
likes) that was adopted by most of the vendors, you could put a call 
such as this in there and not worry that nobody bothered to specify its 
behavior to some high level of detail or build a validation suite to be 
sure that it killed a program in exactly this particular manner with 
precisely these side effects. It would just exist in the library as a 
portable abstraction for the OS call and it does whatever happens when 
the OS call executes. No updates to the ARM, flexible implementation 
allowed, everybody can build portable code, no rigorous and costly 
validation procedures, Ada becomes more useful to everyone, everybody 
wins. I can't see how that would be a bad thing.

MDC



Nick Roberts wrote:
> 
> I think this suggestion makes it clear that: the semantics of such a
> procedure would be difficult to define, and impossible to enforce or test;
> it truly could be really dangerous in some environments. You might consider
> all the above a bit too much to add to the RM to be worth it.
> 


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Marin David Condic
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