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

[Dmitry A.Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

Marin D. Condic wrote:

> 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

They (MS) wrote the following about it:

"The TerminateProcess function is used to unconditionally cause a process 
to exit. Use it only in extreme circumstances. The state of global data 
maintained by dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) may be compromised if 
TerminateProcess is used rather than ExitProcess."
        -- MSDN library

> 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.)

I have only one objection - this cannot be called "portable". There is also 
a problem, where do you want to stop? Portable sockets? Pipes? Mailboxes? 
FTP? 2D-graphics? 3D? SQL? ...

Not that I am against all that (:-)), but it will be very hard to do.

> 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.

Well, if so little is required then Annex B is a perfect place for this:

Interfaces.POSIX
Interfaces.VMS
Interfaces.Win32
...

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov
www.dmitry-kazakov.de