Re: "Abort Evaluation" does not work
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg111949] Re: "Abort Evaluation" does not work
- From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
- Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:17:37 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <i4lnr2$7gs$1@smc.vnet.net>
In article <i4lnr2$7gs$1 at smc.vnet.net>, Themis Matsoukas <tmatsoukas at me.com> wrote: > As Simon and Seeziwa explained, the loop > does respond to 'Abort Evaluation' (but in a way that leaves the user > wondering): it breaks the loop but it does not interrupt the printing of the > i's that have been queued to the output. In this particular example, the loop > is executed very fast (too fast to Abort during its evaluation) while > printing, which takes much longer, does not respond to Abort and so it goes > on till completion, leaving the impression that nothing was aborted. > > The question then is, would it be too difficult for Mathematica to implement > an abort that kills the Print? When I debug I make liberal use of Print > statements and sometimes I do run into this problem of runaway printing that > I cannot Abort. Many, many of us have of course run into the same problem. So, another question would be: if you look up "Abort" in Mathematica's documentation, will it give you a little warning about this, so you'll understand what's happening? Wanna bet? [Scroll down a screen or so to see what the "Additional Information" section at the top of the Abort Help page says.] You can call Abort anywhere within a computation. It has the same effect as an interactive interrupt in which you select the abort option. You can use Abort as an "emergency stop" in a computation. Once Abort has been called, Mathematica functions currently being evaluated return as quickly as possible. In an interactive session, the final result from an aborted computation is $Aborted. You can use CheckAbort to "catch" returns from an abort.