Why doesn't threading.join() return a value?

[Adam Skutt]

On Sep 2, 10:53 am, Roy Smith <r... at panix.com> wrote:
> I have a function I want to run in a thread and return a value.  It
> seems like the most obvious way to do this is to have my target
> function return the value, the Thread object stash that someplace, and
> return it as the return value for join().
> > Yes, I know there's other ways for a thread to return values (pass the
> target a queue, for example), but making the return value of the
> target function available would have been the most convenient.  I'm
> curious why threading wasn't implemented this way.

I assume it is because the underlying operating system APIs do not
support it.  Windows and POSIX threads only support returning an
integer when a thread exits, similar to the exit code of a process.
More importantly, there's no way to tell whether the exit code of a
thread was set by user code or by the system.  Even worse, some of
those integer values are reserved by some operating systems.  If your
thread died via an exception, it still has an error code set by the
operating system.  How would you going to distinguish those codes from
your own?

Adam