On Fri, 4 May 2001, Alan Burlison wrote:
>
> > > I think an implicit assumption is that the platform has pthreads - I
> > > sincerely hope you aren't suggesting that perl does it's own threads
> > > implementation.
> >
> > Having pthreads != being threadsafe at the C level. There are many
> > other factors.
>
> Your point being?....
My point being that the discussion was about Perl being threadsafe if
the underlying C library is fully threadsafe at the C level. Somone,
(you've snipped the attribution, but it may have been you), said
the part quoted above about assuming the platform has pthreads.
There is more to thread safety at the C level than pthreads.
> > anyway. As things are, though, it is not an ideal situation to update
> > to newer libraries.
>
> I'm sorry, but you obviously don't understand backwards compatibility and
> why it is important.
How can you say this? Right there I digressed and admitted that
when the backward compatibility issue cropped up, '...it is not an
ideal situation to update...'. How is that not saying that it
is important to make things work with the current libraries?
I believe you crop too much of previous posts, then reply to
that which you find easiest to rebut outside of context. I
also believe you don't fully read everything before you reply.
Or perhaps I obviously don't understand quoting, either.
> > Granted, memoizing functions and iterators in libraries could
> > be important exceptions for some people, but how common is it to
> > find this sort of functionality in a binary library?
>
> How do you know how common it is if you only have the binary?
Memoization and iteration are fairly high-level details. IMHO,
they shouldn't be in system libraries. They may be there, but
it wouldn't take long to figure out which library functions do
this if you were to start trying to use them in a threaded
program. The world is not perfect. As long as there are issues
with libraries you use, there will be issues with your code
as well. All we can do, short of replacing all the libraries,
is to minimize the damage.
Chris
--
The purpose of a language is not to help you learn the
language, but to help you learn other things by using the
language. --Larry Wall, The Culture of Perl, August 1997
