variable(s) for signal numbers?

[John W. Eaton]

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