Bert Freudenberg wrote:

> >       As for the problem of what to do when timeouts are reached... what's
> > wrong with just putting something in the human interface of the
> > application which lets the human stop the operation in progress?
> 
> Nothing. Except, in a server environment, there won't be a human to press
> that button.

Having spent 3 or 4 years doing machine control using Smalltalk, I think
the proper
answer is probably to raise an exception. If the caller wants to, it can
resume
or retry. Or it can abort, doing whatever cleanup it needs to.

This is the classic kind of thing that exceptions were made for:

low level code detects an error but has no idea what to do about it

high level code can handle the error but is in no position to detect it

Please, please don't put in user interface in the lower level code!

What about those of us who want to run headless, or in a non-interactive
environment?
Shouldn't we be able to specify what happens on a timeout?

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com