[R] Interrupt handling

[Prof Brian Ripley]

The short answer is `no', nothing has changed since 1.8,0.  There was a 
change at 1.8.0, and that was deliberate and described in the NEWS file.
You seem rather confused about this!

A slighter longer answer is that this depended on your unnamed OS having 
such interrupts, so for many R users there was no such facility.
Surely the right thing to do is to make your C code interruptible by 
inserting calls to R_CheckUserInterrupt() so interrupts occur at planned 
places and work on all platforms.  (That's a little harder to do with 
Fortran code, something I plan to address before 1.9.0.)

On Thu, 4 Dec 2003, Arne Kovac wrote:

> I recently installed R 1.8.1 on some of our machines and noted quickly
> that the handling of interrupts has changed since version 1.8.0. Are there
> any plans to reintroduce the old behaviour as a feature when compiling R
> or even better as a command line option? The problem is that we are
> extensively calling C functions from R which take quite a large time to
> finish. With the new version we had to kill the R process quite often and
> at the end we sadly decided to reinstall version 1.7.1 on all of our
> computers.
> 
> Sorry about my complaints, apart from this particular problem we are very
> grateful for all the people developing this fantastic software.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595