Rob Mayoff wrote:
+---------- On Feb 11, Jerry Asher said:
>Sigh, that must've been some sort of computing golden age.... Oh for
>the renaissance!
Yep, the golden age - before multithreaded programming.
I don't believe that's true, in large part because at the time I was
doing multithreading on minis that only had threads and didn't have
processes (Honeywell Level 6). (Level 6 referred to how much HBD was
involved.) But I cannot say that these machines made stack extension
easy or possible. (And I am pretty sure the Lisp Machine had threads,
stacks, and either automatic stack extension, OR at least detected all
stack overruns, but I don't know for sure.) How did/does Ada accomplish
this?
Are you really saying you cannot imagine how in a multithreaded
environment one can automatically and efficiently extend the stack? So
we can expect multithreaded programs to suffer from obscure memory
overruns, rather than fail with a known error?
Jeez, you make a very curious argument against multithreaded
programming. Safety. Mine, yours, and the other folks in our airplane.
(Maybe this explains the Navy destroyer running NT that needed the tow
back to port.)
On the otherhand, I cannot imagine using Tcl in such an environment
either -- my Tcl at least does suffer the runtime detection of a missing
$ (but that really wasn't the argument you made -- not that automatic
stack extension was not efficient for Tcl or useful for Tcl given Tcl's
usage, but that it wasn't possible in a world of multithreaded programming.)
I suspect you're wrong. I hope so.
Jerry
