Re: Timeouts in Ada

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Shark8" <OneWingedShark@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:_Sizv.37414$ic5.15869@fx21.iad...
> On 21-Jul-14 17:34, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>> Ergo, the best thing to do with ATC is to ignore that it exists.
>
> When you have advice like that it kinda indicates a mistake.
> Would you call ATC a mistake? (I've never used it, so I can't REALLY 
> say -- though it seems that perhaps an entirely different structure 
> [rather than overloading SELECT] may've helped.)

It's hard to say. It might be useful in very limited circumstances. As 
Dmitry pointed out, the semantics of abort is so nasty that it is hard to do 
anything useful afterwards, unless what is aborted is carefully limited. 
(And the language gives no help in that.)

So, I'd suggest using it only if there is no other way (the same goes for 
abort proper, BTW), you are sure you know what you are doing, and the 
abortable part doesn't contain any I/O or other system calls [other than 
tasking], but it does contain lots of abort completion points. Then it can 
be used somewhat portably. Definitely stay miles away if any I/O is 
involved, or for that matter any writing of large global data structures.

                                    Randy.