How to kill a thread?

Antoon Pardon apardon at forel.vub.ac.be
Tue Jun 10 03:55:41 EDT 2008


On 2008-06-09, Rhamphoryncus <rhamph at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 9, 5:33 am, Antoon Pardon <apar... at forel.vub.ac.be> wrote:
>> On 2008-06-07, Rhamphoryncus <rha... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > On Jun 6, 12:44 pm, The Pythonista <n... at this.time> wrote:
>> >> It's always been my understanding that you can't forcibly kill a thread
>> >> in Python (at least not in a portable way).  The best you can do is
>> >> politely ask it to die, IIRC.
>>
>> > Inherently, the best you can do in most languages is ask them politely
>> > to die.  Otherwise you'll leave locks and various other datastructures
>> > in an inconvenient state, which is too complex to handle correctly.
>> > The exception is certain functional languages, which aren't capable of
>> > having threads and complex state in the same sense.
>>
>> Well it would of course depend on what is considered asking politely?
>>
>> If one thread could cause an exception being thrown in an other thread,
>> would this be considered a polite way to ask? Would it be considered
>> an acceptable way?
>
> The exception must not be raised until a point explicitly designed as
> safe is hit.  Otherwise, any function that manipulates data you'll
> still use will potentially be buggered.  Consider sys.stdout: codecs,
> buffering, lots to go wrong.

I don't see the point. Exceptions are raised now without the ability
of an explicitly designed safe point. If something unexpected happens
your code can raise an exception and leave your data buggered too if
you didn't anticipate it propely.

-- 
Antoon Pardon



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