John wrote:
On 2006-01-14, Keean Schupke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Erm, has nobody replied to this yet? I want a robust interface, that
uses bracket notation all the way down, so that any error is caught and
resources are freed appropriately without the use of finalizers (which
may not get run and lead to resource starvation - they are not reliable
To be sure, your only failure situation in this case is if you're
dealing with many connections *and* creating/destroying them frequently.
Hopefully you wouldn't be.
You could be using connection pooling in the database driver or ODBC
layer... Here the minimal
overhead of opening/closing allows you to use a "bracket" within each
connection, rather than around
the whole server. Besides which the goal is not just to be safe in
practice, but to be theoretically safe in all
circumstances. If you allow the programmer to shoot themselves in the
foot, then they often will (for example
memory management and buffer overflows)... Its no good to partly remove
responsibility, as that makes bugs
more likely not less likely (If the programmer has to deal with an
opaque system with flaws, unless the programmer
is highly aware of those flaws they will take no account of them in
their coding). The only way you can give the
programmer a genuine black box to play with, is if it is theoretically
safe, then the programmer can (ab)use it
how they wish without accidentally breaking the conditions of usage.
Regards,
Keean.
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