[POLL] Process>>terminate

Paolo Bonzini bonzini at gnu.org
Tue Oct 16 05:16:01 UTC 2007


Igor Stasenko wrote:
> Also note, that because we have only the 'soft' terminate, this leads
> to appearance of some evil code like:
> 
> block := [ [ true] whileTrue: [ ... ] ].

where?

> or even #addOnTerminate: block , which will add a block to a list of
> blocks which will be evaluated when process is terminating.
 >
> Also, i not agree that terminate must be connected with exceptions.

Also in Java termination trigger an exception.  Here, the point is that 
abrupt termination of a process is a nasty thing, something that's going 
to cause bugs unless you take special measures (witness the mess that is 
done in Delay to avoid half-updating the data structures), and the 
process must know about it!  A hard termination must only be used as a 
last measure, really.

If you use these termination blocks heavily, you will soon want to 
remove them.  And sooner or later you realize that the best way to 
remove them is to store their information somewhere on the context chain 
which is where #ensure: and exceptions put it.

The fact that process execution flow *can* be controlled by an exception 
is also hinted by a method such as Process>>#signalException:, which 
will even wake up a process temporarily for the sake of signalling that 
exception.  (Other Smalltalks, such as VA and GNU, have a more generic 
#queueInterrupt: method that takes a block, but Squeak's solution is 
also very elegant).

Paolo




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