with timeout(...):

[John Nagle]

Diez B. Roggisch wrote:
> Nick Craig-Wood wrote:
> 
> 
>>Did anyone write a contextmanager implementing a timeout for
>>python2.5?
>>
>>And have it work reliably and in a cross platform way!
> 
> Cross platform isn't the issue here - reliability though is. To put it
> simple: can't be done that way. You could of course add a timer to the
> python bytecode core, that would "jump back" to a stored savepoint or
> something like that.

     Early versions of Scheme had a neat solution to this problem.
You could run a function with a limited amount of "fuel".  When the
"fuel" ran out, the call returned with a closure.  You could
run the closure again and pick up from where the function had been
interrupted, or just discard the closure.

     So there's conceptually a clean way to do this.  It's probably
not worth having in Python, but there is an approach that will work.

     LISP-type systems tend to be more suitable for this sort of thing.
Traditionally, LISP had the concept of a "break", where
execution could stop and the programmer (never the end user) could
interact with the computation in progress.

				John Nagle