Re: Sending an interrupt to the frontend?
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- Subject: [mg127418] Re: Sending an interrupt to the frontend?
- From: Michael Weyrauch <michael.weyrauch at gmx.de>
- Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 19:54:32 -0400 (EDT)
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Ralph, if you just ask for responsiveness to a user interrupt, then I am fully with you. It bites me often that a calculation goes astray because I did not anticipate correctly what is going to happen. And no doubt, these are standard user errors which can not be avoided, and always happen... to everyone. However, I would not call such behaviour an instability. I once heard on a user conference John Fultz of WRI remark about this issue. WRI knows about that, and certainly would like to do something about that, I understand. However, from his remarks I also understood that this is not as easy as one might expect. I am not a system's programmer, and therefore not able to judge on that. Michael Am 23.07.2012 07:05, schrieb Ralph Dratman: > Michael, > > I understand your point about "bad programming," but must respectfully > disagree. I am only asking that the front end remain responsive to a > user interrupt, no matter what else happens. It already has a very > nice menu item to stop evaluation. Why should such a command ever > fail, or be shown as disabled? > > This is not magic, but ordinary system-level programming. It may > amount to just a few hundred lines of code, causing no loss of > performance whatsoever. There are probably a dozen technical people at > Wolfram who are perfectly capable of fixing the problem. > > Anyway, perhaps I am not being quite as harsh or negative as you > think. A bit of direct talk is necessary in this case. I would not be > writing anything at all if I did not like Mathematica as much as I do. > > Ralph > > > > On 19/07/2012 08:51, Michael Weyrauch wrote: >>> Ralph, >>> >>> I really would like to understand your critical remarks somewhat >>> better. >>> >>> It is clear that one can easily and quickly run the frontend irresponsive. >>> However, in most cases I know, this is actually due to bad programming >>> (from Mathematica's point of view) rather than an instable product. >>> >>> One typical reason is that a command returns symbolic results where the >>> programmer actually expected only numerical stuff, and quickly things get completely out of hand. But how should Mathematica know that all this was not intended? >>> >>> It is the tremendous flexibility and the many possibilities which >>> sometims get into the way, and as a consequence the frontend can not >>> handle the output from the kernel any more. >>> >>> I really do not understand where you expect Wolfram to get "its act >>> together". My experience tells me: A good Mathematica program may run >>> for days without any instability. But my stupitidy and/or lasy >>> programming can run it against >>> the wall within seconds. Mathematica as such is definitely not unstable. >>> (of course, sometimes there are bugs as with any other major (and minor) >>> software). >>> >>> Michael >