From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Jan 10 13:45:16 2003
Subject: variable(s) for signal numbers?
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: octave-maintainers mailing list <octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 13:45:14 -0600

I just implemented a kill function for Octave so you can send signals
to other processes (for example, those you started asynchronously with
system, or a fork/exec).  Now I see that it would be useful to have a
way to access signals by name instead of number, so that you could
write

  kill (pid, SIGHUP);

instead of

  kill (pid, 1);

for example.  The problem with using names like SIGHUP, SIGINT,
etc. is that it adds a lot of built-in variables.  Perhaps it would be
better to have a structure, say __siglist__ (or something, suggestions
for a better name are welcome), that has members like HUP, INT, etc,
so you would write

  kill (pid, __siglist__.HUP);

Then we only add one name to the list of built-in variables instead of
many.

OTOH, to someone used to programming Unixy systems, this doesn't look
as familiar as using SIGHUP.

Comments?

Thanks,

jwe