Hi,
On Sunday 03 November 2002 22:04, William M. Shubert wrote: [...]
as a text command. The advantages of a readable text "abort" outweigh the simpler code in POSIX systems for single character aborts in my opinion. Although I admit, now we're getting into opinions rather than facts, so it is harder to really argue either side of this.
One thing I haven't heard discussed, does anybody really dislike having an optional "abort" command? Or is everybody OK with adding a section to the spec that says "If you support aborting commands, this is the way to do it"?
I have thought about implementing it in the various small "xxxplus" engines. But I immediately hit a snag: it's quite obvious that the engine has to react differently according to what it was doing when it receives the "abort" command. What should it do if it receives the "abort" just after it received a "quit"? Or after receiving a "boardsize"?
Let's assume it can only receive an "abort" after it has received a "genmove"... Should it "undo" anything it has done until now? What if it can't undo changes to some data structures? Should it fail? But the spec says that any failed command should not change the state of the engine...
I confess I gave up after a few minutes. Receiving an "abort", either as a single character or as an (IMHO preferable) full word, in a separate thread, is easy in Linux. Making the engine react in a consistent manner, compatible with the rest of the GTP command set, would certainly require a lot of work.
Perhaps I am wrong and somebody can come up with an unambiguous one-paragraph GTP spec for the "abort" command. I couldn't think of any way to do that. :-(
Regards,