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Re: kill, again
- To: Russell McManus <russell dot mcmanus at msdw dot com>
- Subject: Re: kill, again
- From: "Greg J. Badros" <gjb at cs dot washington dot edu>
- Date: 01 Mar 2000 13:08:13 -0800
- Cc: guile at sourceware dot cygnus dot com
- References: <200002291525.KAA14059@hqsmh3.ms.com>
Russell McManus <russell.mcmanus@msdw.com> writes:
> Oops. After reading the code, I guess that you can use guile's kill
> for the purpose I wanted. It's kind of icky to need the 'catch',
> though. Sorry for useless traffic.
Yep, given the common usage of kill for testing existence of a process,
it does seem a little unfortunate to have to catch an exception. I
could argue it's not an exceptional circumstance that the process not
exist if the signal is 0, and that perhaps we should return either #t,
throw an exception if the signal is not 0 and the process does not
exist, or #f if the signal is 0 and the process does not exist. This,
of course, complicates the description of kill, but simplifies a common
case dramatically. The same simplification could be done in scheme
with an appropriate abstraction, so it remains to decide whether it's
worth changing the primitive to treat the 0 signal specially. Perhaps
the answer for now is just that there are bigger fish to fry...
Greg