[Python-Dev] Re: threading issue: preventing starting twice

[Russell E. Owen]

In article <200402252140.i1PLeoT08847 at guido.python.org>,
 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> > In the threading module, one must of course only start a thread once. I 
> > have some questions about handling this gracefully.
> > 
> > First of all, the documentation only says it is an error to start a 
> > thread more than once. It does not say which exception is raised. On my 
> > system I find it is AssertionError. So...is that going to be true on all 
> > systems? Is the test based on "assert", in which case it will go away 
> > for optimized code (and then what happens)?
> 
> Hey, it's open source!  You can look for yourself. :-)
> 
> Yes, the test is based on assert.

But if a feature is not documented, it could easily be changed in a 
future release with no warning. Thus it would be a mistake to assume 
that this error always raises AssertionError. (Also, since it is based 
on assert, the error will not even be raised if enables the optimizer?).

>...
> There is isRunning().  Isn't that enough?  I realize it doesn't
> distinguish between "not yet running" and "no longer running", but
> your application state should be enough to distinguish between the
> two, right?

I am trying to determine the state of a thread, and in particular 
determine if it's safe to try to start it. Thus isRunning is explicitly 
not enough.

The result is in my own code I end up writing a status layer around the 
thread, but I assume many other programmers have to do the same thing. 
It seems a rather roundabout way to do things when the threading Thread 
object ought to have a pretty good idea what state it is in.

-- Russell