🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <19960204.10AE3B8.A1B8@olympus.net>, dons@olympus.net (Don
Schmelling) wrote:

> What is this facination with the term "Real Life?"

I don't find trivial things that don't occur in practice to be all that
interesting.  I work on real systems.  Theoretitians and geeks might find
these endless debates about trivial problems to be enlightening in some
way, but I don't.  Interesting problems inspire me to think about them. 
It's fairly obvious to me that when you program a CMT based system, you
have to give up the CPU in order for other processes to execute.  It
didn't take much brain power on my part to come to this conclusion.  Maybe
it excites your brain cells.  Maybe you think that you have discovered
something so fundamental to the foundations of computer science that if we
ignore it we'll all go down in flames.

This is the part I find interesting:  why does people think that this
issue is interesting and has enough substance to spend more than a few
seconds thinking about it?  In other words, I'm in it for the meta-debate.

> I never said that you could not break out of this program.
> I was attempting to say, that while this program is running
> you are not multitasking.

Well, I obviously am on some level, since the mechanism that allows me to
break out of this program is not part of the infinite loop itself.  The
clock on my menu bar updates also.  Now, my system may not automatically
go to another high-level process, but it certainly allows other
lower-level tasks to continue executing.

> Now perhaps eventually an interupt
> can take place,

What do you mean by eventually?  I'm not blocking them, so what would
cause them to delay?

> but for all the time between then you are
> not multitasking you are running ONE TASK.

But that is always true unless you have more than one processor!

> : And I have yet to find a reason to run programs this badly written.

> That really is not the issue.

Of course it is the issue.  Programming is a contract between the
programmer and the OS.  If the programmer breaks the rules, bad things
happen.  I have yet to use a system that has absolutely no rules at all.

> The issue is that a badly written program
> can hog the cpu on a CMT system while on a PMT system the program is
> given a certain amount of cpu.

That is because one of the rules of programming a CMT system is that you
have to give up time for other processes to run.  Duh.  Are you really,
truly, honestly so dumb that you don't understand this?  If you really
don't, then you are too stupid to be programming a Mac or Windows or DOS
machine.

What happens on your Amiga if I raise the priority on for (;;); so that it
is higher than everything else?  Are you still multitasking?  If not, then
the Amiga is just as broken as CMT systems.  If yes, then there is no way
to guarantee that you won't be switched out, which can also be a bad
thing, depending on what you are doing.

Maybe you find this whole discussion insightful and fascinating, but I
find it rather boring.  As science, it's useless; I can't use it to
predict anything, because my compiler, word processor, spreadsheet, ftp
client, news reader, email client, etc. don't have the characteristic that
they need to run an infinite loop.  All of the programmers of these apps
seem to be a bit brighter than you, because they figured out that they had
to give up the CPU occasionally to let other processes run.
-- 
        Nevin ":-)" Liber       nevin@CS.Arizona.EDU    (520) 293-2799