Re: Proposal for a new mechanism for delayed stuff

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Achim Gratz writes:

 > All languages I know that have a syntactic "break" use it to modify 
 > local control flow.

Point taken.  This is really more like a throw (but I don't trust my
intuition enough to suggest anything right now :-P )..

 > Unless I missed some vital part of the discussion, we'd want to
 > terminate an async process that has used up the time budget alotted
 > to it.

No, it's because Emacs is blocking that this timeout mechanism has
been suggested.  If the task were asynchronous there wouldn't be a
need for a separate timeout.  We would just sleep a bit and check a
buffer from Lisp code, and repeat a fixed number of times or until
success, whichever comes first.  It could used for any potentially
long-running synchronous task, whether I/O or a user-specified
Lisp computation.