Extension for non-polling and non-blocking input?

From: M.Vodslon <vodslon_at_fokus.gmd.de>
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 16:33:57 +0100

Bonjour les schemeurs!

I spent a few days programming with Tcl/Tk. Then someone showed me
Richard Stallman's "advert" for STk in comp.lang.tcl and I saw light
again. I might even be able to persuade others to switch to STk.

My problem: The program I need to write (quickly) must react to and
send messages from/to other process(es), to which it is connected
through pipes.

I have tried the process extension in STk-2.1.3/Contrib/Process/ and
it seems to work (documentation = uncommented source code, but that's
OK :-).

However, my future program must not stay blocked while waiting for
input from a pipe - it must react to X events in the meantime (at
least; the Scheme read-eval-print loop should also remain active, if
possible).

So I need something like XtAppAddInput which is part of the Xt
toolkit.

I would imagine something like

  (add-input an-input-port a-callback)

  (remove-input an-input-port)

where a-callback is a procedure of 1 argument which will be applied to
an-input-port when there is something to read on an-input-port.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to write such an extension and keep my
current deadlines.

Question: Has somebody already written an extension like or equivalent
to this for STk? Or must I (:<) return to Tcl which has it?

Thanks.

Miroslav Vodslon

Gesellschaft fuer Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung, Forschungsinstitut
fuer offene Kommunikationssysteme, (GMD-FOKUS), Hardenbergplatz 2,
D-10623 Berlin. Voice 49-30-25499185. Fax 49-30-25499202.
Received on Thu Oct 06 1994 - 16:44:42 CET