[self-interest] simplicity

[Brian Rice]

On Jun 29, 2004, at 3:23 AM, Steven Shaw wrote:

> On Monday 28 June 2004 15:54, Toby Ovod-Everett wrote:
>> On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 08:20:43PM -0700, Michael Latta wrote:
>> when writing multi-threaded code that I have to worry about race
>> conditions.  But my instinct is to presume that in single-threaded 
>> code
>> that I can forget about them, and that is no longer the case when
>> deterministic finalization goes out the window.
>
> But surely not unless you're going to have a finalisation method (this 
> assumes
> that the finalisation will be done on another thread - probably the gc
> thread). If you write single threaded code and have no need for 
> finalisation
> then you still don't need to worry about 
> race-conditions/non-determinism.
>
> Can't most resources be managed via with-open-file type of calls (of 
> scheme,
> lisp, dylan)?
>
> Anyone know if this idiom made it into Self and/or Smalltalk?

FileStream named:do: from my email is exactly such an idiom. Avi Bryant 
cooked it up for this discussion:
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/newyork/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=1998

Self can do this in other ways, but this is the basic proof of concept.

--
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/