[e-lang] Being Disheartened by MarkM's Eventual I/O (was: While thinking of operator syntax)

[Mark S. Miller]

At 08:30 AM 6/24/2002 Monday, Dan Bornstein wrote:
>(At the time of one of the abovementioned incidents, I wrote a note about
>ideas for what this I/O stuff might look like in E. I was disheartened by
>the lack of response.)

Sorry.  This seems to be the part of coordinating an open source process 
that I'm doing least well.  Although you may be the first to say so on the 
list, you are by no means the first to be disheartened, or even pissed off, 
by my poor management of the queue of important topics to discuss.  I do 
consider your topic important, indeed required.  E's I/O primitives must 
never block indefinitely.  Non-prompt I/O should be designed according to 
E's normal eventual-send & promise principles, as you were proposing.  The 
current E I/O library is an unacceptable violation of E's semantics.

To build E, I have to juggle more balls than I can juggle at once.  I'm 
sorry I let yours drop at the present time, but this is in no way due to 
lack of interest.  Merely due to a sense that I could postpone this issue 
while I'm working on others.

Would a page at erights listing open discussions threads, with links to the 
archives of the current tails of these threads, help?  (Over the life of 
e-lang, we have many such dormant open threads, and progress on some of 
these remains critical.)  Would such a page help keep a postponed thread 
from turning into an ignored one?  Or, are there any conventional solutions 
to this issue? Anything y'all think would work better?  Suggestions?


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Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

        Cheers,
        --MarkM