[Python-Dev] Threading idea -- exposing a global thread lock (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Tue Mar 14 05:06:49 CET 2006

At 09:57 PM 3/13/2006 -0500, Raymond Hettinger wrote:

FWIW, the new with-statement makes the above fragment even more readable:

with atomictransaction(): # do a series of steps without interruption

+1 on the idea, -1000 on the name. It's neither atomic nor a transaction. I believe that "critical section" is a more common term for what you're proposing.

Probably the primitive could be placed in the thread or threading module, so that it would be something like:

 with threading.critical_section():
     # ...

It might be nice to be able to escape out of the critical section using a nested with: statement, as this would allow you to treat much of a program as single-threaded, and then selectively allow task switching. But I'm not sure what you'd call that API. :)

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