Message-ID: <16262.35155.835148.704877@gargle.gargle.HOWL>
Date: 2003-10-10T12:25:32Z
From: Martin Maechler
Subject: 1.8.0 on Unix: interrupting huge print()s ??
NEWS for R 1.8.0 has
>> USER-VISIBLE CHANGES
>>
>> <......>
>>
>> o On Unix-like systems interrupt signals now set a flag that is
>> checked periodically rather than calling longjmp from the
>> signal handler. This is analogous to the behavior on Windows.
>> This reduces responsiveness to interrupts but prevents bugs
>> caused by interrupting computations in a way that leaves the
>> system in an inconsistent state. It also reduces the number
>> of system calls, which can speed up computations on some
>> platforms and make R more usable with systems like Mosix.
and this has already caused grief here
(actually it has several days ago, when I switched our users to
R-1.8.0beta __ BUT THEY DIDN'T TELL ANY R DEVELOPER __ )
for a user who does use *large* matrices.
When accidentally calling print() {implicitly}, we have been
used here to press CTRL+c (twice in Emacs ESS!) for stopping the
output.
This no longer works in R 1.8.0 at least on our unix platforms.
To reproduce, type
cbind(1:1e6)
and try to cut it short (it only takes a minute or so,
whereas our user here had a matrix that needed more than 10
minutes of screen output !)