Avoiding mouse polls

[Ken Norris (dialup)]

> Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 17:14:57 +1100
> Subject: Re: Avoiding mouse polls
> From: David Vaughan <dvk at dvkconsult.com.au>

> What is wrong with mouseUp and mouseRelease rather than polling for the
> mouseClick? You need to catch both because you can not predict (and do
> not care) where the mouse went down, but these will work, will they
> not? No object is involved (except for whatever you yourself are
> highlighting for them).
> 
> You can highlight objects by using a counter to iterate through the
> keys of an array from which you take the object IDs. That way, you have
> easy programmatic control of the object highlight sequence without
> having to fiddle with the code which actually orders the highlights.
----------
Yes, that's true, but I'm not sure I'm being understood. The problem doesn't
lie with level location, but with interrupting a continuous loop. The entire
sequence mentioned above is in a nested loop. The hilited objects don't just
sequence once, but loop continuously until the mouse is clicked. In other
words, if no mouseclick occurs, it continues the hiliting sequence until it
reaches the last object, then starts over, forever.

So far, I have still found no way to interrupt a continuous loop with an
action external to the loop. It was suggested that I change a global
variable, but I can't see a way to change _anything_ while the loop is still
running.

Plus, in my case, due to the necessity of a single-switch solution the
interrupt must be caused by a click, however it happens.

At the most basic level:

on anyHandler
  repeat
  -- AFAIK, no external action, other than cmd/. on a Mac,
  -- can interrupt this.
  end repeat
end

...creates an endless loop.

How do I interrupt that with a click unless:

on anyHandler
  repeat until the mouseClick -- polls the mouse
  end repeat
end

...or unless there is another way of looping continuously to look for a
click?

TIA, 
Ken N.