Messing Around with Timeouts. In Contracts?

Many (embedded) systems are often designed with timeouts at places where they are not needed or even wrong. When there is a timeout, it may break the very idea of how a contract should be: without timeout. For example, some response from an internal communication driver (that handles an external connection) may be awaited for with a timeout – when it might be better just to wait for a proper response from the driver telling that the connection is indeed broken (i.e. that the driver performs the timeout). Timeout has a dimension of layer associated with it. For the given example, the timeout was properly handled by the driver to detect the broken connection, not by the client.