On Tue, 4 Oct 2011, Frank Church wrote:
What is the purpose of the while not Terminated in a threads execute loop? If a thread is doing its own thing and knows when or not it has finished what is the purpose of the while not Terminated Is Terminated designed to be called by other procedures besides the thread itself? Can a thread be Terminated externally?
Yes.
This also seems to imply that if the code within the while not Terminated loop is a long running sequence a Termniate command will not be processed until control returns to the beginning of the loop
The Execute method is supposed to check Terminated at regular intervals.
Can a thread respond to a new Execute command while it already Executing? Do threads have ways of being interrogated about their state while Executing?
No. It is an error to call execute twice. The only interrogation you can do is check for 'Terminated'.
Suspend and Resume have been deprecated, and I want to know how a thread can be suspended.
There is - to my knowledge - no safe way of doing so.
If a thread is not set to FreeOnTerminate, can a thread suspend itself by using Terminate or some other custom function, doing some clean ups and waiting so it can be restarted by the Start procedure, by adding some custom fields to make it itself aware that it is an a paused state, so that when an Execute is sent it look up those fields, set Terminated to false and continue as though nothing has happened?
Terminate should only be used to actually terminate the thread. You can implement some custom commands to put them in a 'suspended' state, if you want. (using mutexes, semaphores and whatnot) You should assume only that if Execute() exits, the thread will be cleaned up. Michael. -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
