If you take a look at Kent Pitman's paper, linked from the post, (http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h...), particularly the section 'Unifying "Signals" and "Exceptions"', he points out that signal(7) is actually doing two orthogonal things - process interrupt, and signal raising.
He also points out how the signal(7) and Lisp conditions came out of Multics. If you consider it that way, it becomes clear that the Unix decision to overload signal(7) with two different functions is why it is such a poor interface and major source of pain.
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If you take a look at Kent Pitman's paper, linked from the post, (http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h...), particularly the section 'Unifying "Signals" and "Exceptions"', he points out that signal(7) is actually doing two orthogonal things - process interrupt, and signal raising.
He also points out how the signal(7) and Lisp conditions came out of Multics. If you consider it that way, it becomes clear that the Unix decision to overload signal(7) with two different functions is why it is such a poor interface and major source of pain.