On 10/12/2012 8:26 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 5:01 PM, Greg Ewing greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz wrote:
Can we please use a better term than "reactor" for this? Its meaning is only obvious to someone familiar with Twisted.
Not being such a person, it's taken me a while to figure out from this discussion that it refers to the central object implementing the event loop, and not one of the user-supplied objects that could equally well be described as "reacting" to events.
Something like "dispatcher" would be clearer, IMO.
Sorry about that. I'm afraid it's too late for this thread's subject line, but I will try to make sure that if and when this makes it into the standard library it'll have a more appropriate name. I would recommend event loop (which is the name I naturally would give it when asked out of context) or I/O loop, which is what Tornado apparently used. Dispatcher would not be my first choice.
FWIW, it's not a completely Twisted-specific term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_pattern
Thanks for the clarification. Reactors react to events within an event loop* by dispatching them to handlers. Correct?
*Iteration rather than recursion is required because they continue the cycle indefinitely.
I am still fuzzy on edge-triggered versus level triggered in this context, as opposed to electronics.