equivalent to Tcl 'after' command?

[Mark Harrison]

I'm writing some event-driven programs, and I would like
to do the equivalent of the Tcl 'after' command, e.g.:

after 1000 {puts "one second has elapsed"}

1. What's the most canonical way of doing this?

2. What's the best reference that talks about non-gui event loop
programming in Python?

Many TIA!
Mark

--
Mark Harrison
Pixar Animation Studios

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Re: equivalent to Tcl 'after' command?

> after 1000 {puts "one second has elapsed"}[color=blue]
>
> 1. What's the most canonical way of doing this?
>
> 2. What's the best reference that talks about non-gui event loop
> programming in Python?[/color]

Has been a while since I used tcl/tk, so I'm a bit rusty here. But AFAIK
that after stuff was needed when the tk event loop took over control. Sooo
- _if_ you use a toolkit, it most probably features such a facility.

In python, such stuff is usually accomplished using threads - and since a
recent version, there is the module sched. Which internally uses threads. I
personally ripped the webware taskkit for recurrent tasks.
--
Regards,

Diez B. Roggisch

[Jeff Epler]

Re: equivalent to Tcl 'after' command?

Python doesn't define any event loop of its own. asyncore has one, but
I don't think it has the concept of scheduling events at a future time,
but only of reacting to the readability / writability of sockets.

I'm sure that more advanced systems, like Twisted, can do the kind of
thing you're asking for.

Jeff

[Roy Smith]

Re: equivalent to Tcl 'after' command?

In article <huThc.54272$9V 6.15414@newssvr 25.news.prodigy .com>,
Mark Harrison <mh@pixar.com > wrote:
[color=blue]
> I'm writing some event-driven programs, and I would like
> to do the equivalent of the Tcl 'after' command, e.g.:
>
> after 1000 {puts "one second has elapsed"}[/color]

You want to took at the Timer objects that are part of the threading
module

http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/timer-objects.html

[Peter Hansen]

Re: equivalent to Tcl 'after' command?

Jeff Epler wrote:
[color=blue]
> Python doesn't define any event loop of its own. asyncore has one, but
> I don't think it has the concept of scheduling events at a future time,
> but only of reacting to the readability / writability of sockets.
>
> I'm sure that more advanced systems, like Twisted, can do the kind of
> thing you're asking for.[/color]

It does, using reactor callLater(), but I'd go for the sched approach
if it's just a one-off.

[Alan Gauld]

Re: equivalent to Tcl 'after' command?

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 17:42:37 GMT, Mark Harrison <mh@pixar.com >
wrote:[color=blue]
> I'm writing some event-driven programs, and I would like
> to do the equivalent of the Tcl 'after' command, e.g.:
>
> after 1000 {puts "one second has elapsed"}
>
> 1. What's the most canonical way of doing this?[/color]

I suspect its to start a thread that in turn starts with
a sleep command. Not very pretty but approximately the same.
[color=blue]
> 2. What's the best reference that talks about non-gui event loop
> programming in Python?[/color]

My book(paperversi on only discusses them briefly but its hardly a
rference, more an intro to the convcept for beginners...

Its not quite the same as a pure event loop environment but you
could check out the cmd module for a text based command loop/menu
system. If you haven't already....

HTH,

Alan G.
Author of the Learn to Program website

http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld

[Jeff Epler]

Re: equivalent to Tcl 'after' command?

> On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 17:42:37 GMT, Mark Harrison <mh@pixar.com >[color=blue]
> wrote:[color=green]
> > I'm writing some event-driven programs, and I would like
> > to do the equivalent of the Tcl 'after' command, e.g.:
> >
> > after 1000 {puts "one second has elapsed"}
> >
> > 1. What's the most canonical way of doing this?[/color]
>[/color]
On Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 11:52:57PM +0100, Alan Gauld wrote:[color=blue]
> I suspect its to start a thread that in turn starts with
> a sleep command. Not very pretty but approximately the same.[/color]

But "doing something in about X ms in a thread" and "doing something in
about X ms from the event loop" are different: the latter basically
frees you from worrying about locking, race conditions, and the rest,
because you know it can't run concurrently with arbitrary other code.

Jeff

[Giles Brown]

Re: equivalent to Tcl 'after' command?

Mark Harrison <mh@pixar.com > wrote in message news:<huThc.542 72$9V6.15414@ne wssvr25.news.pr odigy.com>...[color=blue]
> I'm writing some event-driven programs, and I would like
> to do the equivalent of the Tcl 'after' command, e.g.:
>
> after 1000 {puts "one second has elapsed"}
>
> 1. What's the most canonical way of doing this?[/color]

Not exactly canonical (I certainly haven't used it more than once if that), but
there is the standard library "sched" module.

Giles