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From: leonardr@svc.portal.com (Leonard Rosenthol)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Idle and Hypercard 2.0
Message-ID: <1991Jan1.192341.28803@svc.portal.com>
Date: 1 Jan 91 19:23:41 GMT
References: <22363@well.sf.ca.us>
Sender: news@svc.portal.com
Reply-To: leonardr@svc.portal.com (Leonard Rosenthol)
Organization: Software Ventures Corporation.
Lines: 24

In article <22363@well.sf.ca.us>, wdh@well.sf.ca.us (Bill Hofmann) writes:
> Here's a question, since MacDTS is on (gasp!) vacation.  I have an XCMD
> which sits in a loop waiting for a condition to match or a timer to expire,
> but I'd like other processes *in* Hypercard to get time.  (That is, GNE or
> WNE won't do the trick.)  Should I SendCardMessage(paramPtr, 'idle')?  That
> doesn't seem to work.  Suggestions are welcome.
> 
	I don't believe you can, Bill.  The problem is that Hypercard is
not truely reentrant or multitasking, which is really what you want it to
be.  I see two solutions, one (as suggested elsewhere) is to make your XCMD
create an XWindow (they can be invisible) and then do a SetXWIdleTime to
get the nullEvents to do the tests you need.  This will allow the rest of
HC to continue and you can do what you need.  If, for some reason, this is
not acceptable, you may wish to try using the SendHCEvent and RunHandler
callbacks  (new with 2.0) which will allow you to pass back individual events
(including nulls), and run specific handlers (like 'on idle') respectively.

Leonard
--
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+ Leonard Rosenthol              | Internet: leonardr@sv.portal.com  +
+ Software Ventures              | GEnie:    MACgician               +
+ MicroPhone II Development Team | AOL:      MACgician1              +
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