Re: stupid question: how can I finish a program?

["Marin D. Condic" <not.valid@acm.org>]

Yes, I understand that there are potential issues as to what exactly happens
from one OS to another and I understand that there are dangers in its use
because its behavior can't necessarily deal with everything cleanly or do
what you would want it to do under the circumstances. But note that a)
Windows does provide an OS call to abort the process and b) I said the
following:

> > Would the formal definition need to be any more complicated than:
> > "Implementation Defined - but we suggest that you make it do what any
sane
> > person using the target OS would reasonably expect..."? It doesn't seem

(In other words, you could have it make monkeys fly out of your nose, but a
sane person would expect it to call the OS provided "abort" procedure and do
whatever that does.)

Just because there is no absolutely safe or absolutely portable or
absolutely consistent way of doing something in Ada, doesn't mean it
shouldn't be done. A complaint that a lot of C programmers have about Ada is
that it keeps stoping them from doing what they want to do. Sometimes that
is a good thing, but sometimes its just plain stubbornness on the part of
Ada insisting that because an answer isn't "perfect" that it won't provide
one that is "good enough". Providing a portable interface to what ANSI C
calls "abort();" (and similar...) doesn't sound like something that should
be avoided just because it might be misused or that the results might not be
consistent across all platforms.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com

Enabling Digital.
Our Vision is to be the biggest supplier worldwide of digital gateway
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"Dmitry A.Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
news:akkrtr$1jg0vq$1@ID-77047.news.dfncis.de...

>
> Consider Windows. To kill a process, does not mean that all DLLs and all
> non-standard drivers it used get notified. Which also means that even if
> you have killed a process the system is not brought to the state it had
> before the process start. Yes, you can define a procedure Kill_The_Process
> but you cannot specifiy what this procedure does! Which resources will be
> freed? Will they available after procedure completion? What about access
> rights? So the single thing which will be portable is the name of the
> procedure. (:-))
>