Re: Sending an interrupt to the frontend?
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- Subject: [mg127415] Re: Sending an interrupt to the frontend?
- From: Ralph Dratman <ralph.dratman at gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 01:04:32 -0400 (EDT)
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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