Re: [Pythoncard-users] walkthrough 3 questions

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

On Apr 25, 2004, at 3:35 AM, Arthur Elsenaar wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm working my way through the tutorials and stumbled upon some issues 
> at walkthrough 3, timers and threads here:
>
> http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/timers-threads.html
>
> Running the threads example, I got a time.sleep() unknown error that i 
> fixed by importing the time module (this should be added to the page). 
> Also when I run the thing, it's continuously spitting out idle events. 
> Is this supposed to happen, it seems very inefficient. In the code, 
> the thread is sleeping for 10 seconds and then an idle event is 
> generated by a wx.wxWakeUpIdle().
>
> Hope someone has some answers for a newbie.
>
> Arthur
> btw: running OS X 10.3.3
>

I'll add the note about importing the time module when I update the 
document for release 0.8 unless David is going to do that. The problem 
with the idle events that you're seeing could be explained by the fact 
that on wxWidgets/wxPython the "idle" event really means the event 
queue just emptied. That means simply moving the mouse is going to 
result in an idle event after each mouseMove since the queue will 
empty. That is why the PythonCard Message Watcher doesn't have an 
option to display idle events.

Anyway, for release 0.8 I'm seriously considering renaming the idle 
event to something that more accurately describes what the event really 
means like eventQueueEmpty, the problem being that that is very long 
name and everyone will misspell queue ;-) Perhaps noMoreEvents would be 
better but that isn't very accurate. I'm open to suggestions.

For threading rather than using WakeUpIdle I think I will start 
recommending a change to using wxCallAfter and some user-defined event 
handler instead since that will have the same effect. When I look at 
updating the timers-threads.html document and the other samples that 
use WakeUpIdle I'll take a closer look at the alternatives.

David McNab is still on the mailing list, so he might have some other 
comments to add.

ka