Using "send...in <time>" wirh private commands?

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Wieder wrote:
> On 11/07/2015 09:13 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
>> This works:
>>
>> command SomeTimer
>>    DoSomething
>>    send "SomeTimer" to me in 500 millisecs
>> end SomeTimer
>>
>> This doesn't work:
>>
>> private command SomeTimer
>>    DoSomething
>>    send "SomeTimer" to me in 500 millisecs
>> end SomeTimer
>>
>> I can kinda understand why, but I'd like to be able to manage a timer
>> from within a library without exposing the timer to other scripts.
>>
>> Anyone know of a trick for that?
>
> Nope. That has never worked.
> I've resigned myself to making the targets of send and dispatch commands
> public. The only way I can think of to get around this is to make a
> public method that then calls the private one. Same thing with callback
> handlers.

Inelegant, but this seems to at least block outside callers:

on SomeTimer
    put item 1 of line -2 of the executionContexts into tCaller
    if (tCaller is not empty) AND (tCaller <> the long id of me) then
       exit SomeTimer
    end if
    --
    DoSomething
    send "SomeTimer" to me in 500 millisecs
end SomeTimer



PS - a pleasant timing surprise:

One of the things I was testing this morning was the CPU impact of 
frequently polling for the existence of a file.  I have two processes 
which (for reasons not worth getting into here) can't talk via sockets, 
so I wondered how inefficient it might be to have them communicate via 
files.  Turns out checking for the existence of a specified file isn't 
bad at all.

Testing a worst-case I polled every millisecond and it never chewed up 
more than 4% of CPU time.  Throttling back to a more reasonable 500 ms 
never registered higher than 0%.

Not sure how well that would work on Windows, but OS X and Linux file 
system caching seems to make even brute force solutions like polling 
pretty nice.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
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