Elf scripsit: > you cant take the car or cdr of an atomic object: the slots dont exist.
And yet in CL and all the way back to Lisp 1.5, (car nil) = (cdr nil) = nil. In pre-CL Lisps, the CDR of a symbol was its property list; CL finally abolished that. > these arent relevant comparisons. more relevant comparisons would be other > thread/concurrency systems: do any not allow threads to be killed? As I pointed out before, Java has deprecated suspend and terminate: http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/concurrency/threadPrimitiveDeprecation.html Here's Microsoft's own discussion of why ThreadSuspend should not be used (except by debuggers that need to freeze threads so it can inspect their contents, something Scheme doesn't support): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686345(VS.85).aspx Consequently, the .NET version is deprecated. (Note that thread-terminate! is the same as a thread-suspend! that is never resumed, so one argument applies to both.) POSIX threads have no suspend at all. (Some implementations add it.) Cygwin provides its own threading package, documented at http://www.navosha.com/ecos/c/cyg_thread.html . The suspend and terminate functions are marked dangerous, for the same old reasons. In short, everyone provides suspension for backward compatibility with their thread-naive definitions, everyone deprecates it or strongly discourages its use. It is Considered Harmful. It should go. > a more relevant comparison (and answer) might be 'why don't we get > rid of 'kill -9'?' Because there are very few shared resources between processes, and the kernel knows how to clean them up (with the exception of terminal settings). Threads, by contrast, in principle share everything, and nobody knows how to clean up. > i dont think removing necessary, albeit dangerous (atm), functionality > is a good idea. Lispers spent decades thinking dynamic binding of lambda variables was necessary functionality even after they were finally convinced it was dangerous. Part of what made Scheme revolutionary was that it threw that functionality away (and CL followed, breaking with the past). -- Yes, chili in the eye is bad, but so is your John Cowan ear. However, I would suggest you wash your [EMAIL PROTECTED] hands thoroughly before going to the toilet. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan --gadicath _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
