Interactive terminal application

[cormullion]

I've been writing an IRC library, but I'm a bit stuck on the best way to arrange things so that you can type input at a terminal while still running an event loop that polls the server periodically. As we know, there's no way you can have a non-blocking read-line, so how would it be possible to combine both 'read' and 'write' tasks into a single terminal window? (My previous attempt - using fork - doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for.)



My 'read' code looks like this:

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(define (read-irc)
    (let ((buffer {}))
        (while  (not (net-select Iserver "read" 500))
                (sleep 500))    
        (net-receive Iserver buffer 8192 "n")
        (unless (empty? buffer)
            (parse-buffer buffer))))

(define (read-irc-loop)
    (let ((buffer {}))
        (while Iconnected
            (read-irc))))


[Lutz]

The following program will print a dot after every second until you enter something from the keyboard:

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#!/usr/bin/newlisp

(while (zero? (peek 0)) (sleep 1000) (println ".") ) ; 0 for stdin

(println "--->" (read-line 0))

(exit)


Instead of waiting and printing dots, something else could be done, like waiting for and displaying input from IRC.





See also here: http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/newlisp_manual.html#peek">http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/newlis ... .html#peek">http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/newlisp_manual.html#peek

[cormullion]

Ah, that looks promising. Thanks!