Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!oliveb!amiga!boing!dale From: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: Negative Open Counts (was Re: IEEE libraries) Keywords: open counts Message-ID: <368@boing.UUCP> Date: 13 Sep 88 07:45:44 GMT References: <1356@percival.UUCP> <358@boing.UUCP> <1570@sbcs.sunysb.edu> <362@boing.UUCP> <39822@linus.UUCP> Reply-To: dale@boing.UUCP (Dale Luck) Distribution: na Organization: Boing, Milpitas, Ca. Lines: 47 In article <39822@linus.UUCP> eachus@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Robert I. Eachus) writes: > > If setting the open count negative makes a library permanently >resident (at least till the next warm boot, or someone intentionally >diddles the bits) we get the following rule: Not the present behavior of any amiga library. It is also a bad precedent to set. It should somehow tell the user/programmer that something bad has happened. However it may only be a notification and not a dead end item. > > When a library is opened by a task, if the (open) count is > non-negative, increment it by one. When a library is closed > decrement the count by one. Libraries may only be unloaded > when the count is zero. This already occurs! and it works well, it saves on memory. > > Simple and sweet. I like the idea of ratcheting the count down, >but setting all negative counts to minus one or some other value is >equally acceptable. In any case, other than to very simple OS >changes, no fuss, no bother. It might be nice to add a make >permanently resident call, and a force unload utility, but these are >frills. And it is all very useful. A library could force itself to >stay resident if it opened a resouce behind the users back when it >needed to maintain state. (Such a library would have to track itself, >but this shouldn't be hard if it is needed.) It is not a good idea to put this stuff in any of the libraries and begin a precedent of tolerating software bugs. We must strive for perfection in this operating system and associated applications or we will eventually wind up limited by our own short sightedness. If we expect to continue to make progress we must be able to count on certain activities in the os and applications. The ones that for some reason or another fail to work properly must be revved to that other applications and os software can count on well running execution environment. -- Dale Luck Boing, Inc. {cbmvax|oliveb|pyramid}|!amiga!boing!dale Although I do contract work for Amiga-LosGatos, my opinions probably don't represent those of Commodore or its management or its engineers, but I think the world would be a better place if they did.