Re: is there a 'wait' command in Ada

[Corey Minyard <minyard@metronet.com>]

kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen) writes:
> In article <m2hgm4vnzz.fsf@metronet.com>, Corey Minyard <minyard@metronet.com> writes:
> 
> > This has bugged me since I started using GNAT.  If you use a delay,
> > you get a multi-threaded application.  There is no way around it that
> > I have found.  It is not a debugger issue (although a multi-threaded
> > debugger would be useful).
> 
> If the debugger in question cannot deal with threads, that still
> seems to me to be a debugger issue.  I thought I read from Mike's
> comment that a correct program would run alright unless the
> debugger is introduced.
> 

I'm not saying that the lack of a threaded-aware debugger is ok when
debugging multi-threaded programs.  I'm saying that requiring a
threaded-aware debugger to debug a program that is not multi-threaded
is a problem.

IMHO, the GNAT compiler should only require threads if using tasks.
Since delay is not implicitly an operation requiring threads, it
shouldn't require them.

I wrote an Ada application to send pages to my alphanumeric pager.  It
used delay to time operations for retrying them.  My wife (for whom
the program was written :-) was very annoyed that she could not ^C the
program (due to it using pthreads).  So, I modified GNAT to use
linuxthreads (a kernel posix thread package) which works better in
that respect.  I would have preferred to not have to do that.  But now
I can do System V shared semaphores in a multi-task application
without locking up the whole process, which is something else I
needed.

-- 
Corey Minyard               Internet:  minyard@metronet.com
  Work: minyard@nortel.ca       UUCP:  minyard@wf-rch.cirr.com
-- 
Corey Minyard               Internet:  minyard@metronet.com
  Work: minyard@nortel.ca       UUCP:  minyard@wf-rch.cirr.com