On 28/11/2007, Ben Franksen
It was fun, too. For instance, the OP's question reminded me of a little generic wrapper I wrote -- more or less for my own amusement -- during the course of this project. It outputs dots during an operation that might take a little longer to finish (a database query in my case)... just so the user doesn't get nervous ;-) And because I enjoyed it so much (and to show off) I threw in the timing measurement... [...] I think nobody in his right mind would even try to do something like that in C or Perl or whatever, at least not if it wasn't strictly a requirement and correct operation is important (the script gets executed as part of our build process and a subtle concurrency bug could lead to a wrong configuration for the target control system). In Haskell it was so easy to do that I just couldn't resist.
That's a neat idea. Just (a) because I like the idea, and (b) because I'm contrary :-) I coded up the equivalent in Python. It also looks beautifully clean: from __future__ import with_statement import threading import sys # Implementation of Ticker class class Ticker(threading.Thread): def __init__(self, msg): threading.Thread.__init__(self) self.msg = msg self.event = threading.Event() def __enter__(self): self.start() def __exit__(self, ex_type, ex_value, ex_traceback): self.event.set() self.join() def run(self): sys.stdout.write(self.msg) while not self.event.isSet(): sys.stdout.write(".") sys.stdout.flush() self.event.wait(1) # Here's how we use it... if __name__ == '__main__': import time with Ticker("A test"): time.sleep(10) with Ticker("Second test"): time.sleep(5) raise Exception("Bang!") Paul.