Software Design Lecture Notes
Fall 2004

For Friday, prepare for the exam.

For Monday, work on your project.

Exam questions?


Threading
---------

A thread is an object that can execute a program.

In UNIX, when you launch a program from the shell,
it creates one thread that executes the program.

If you want additional threads, you have to create them
yourself.

Here's the standard idiom:

thread = Thread(target=loop, args=[string.lowercase, 0.4])
thread.start()


But it's so ugly it begs to be encapsulated:

def run_in_thread(function, *args, **kwargs):
    thread = Thread(target=function, args=args, kwargs=kwargs)
    thread.start()
    return thread

run_in_thread(loop, string.lowercase, 0.4)