Stuff I've written in this app so far takes some kind of input, does some stuff, and outputs the result, and then waits for further input. What's the best way to create a contiuous process that is nevertheless able to respond to inputs as an interrupt?
If there's a lot of work to be done, I would chop it up into pieces and have a Clock Timer work them between Enter Button Clicks.
There will be global lists or a database to keep track of it all
I was beginning to wonder if a timer to instigate tasks might have been involved.
I find this very surprising though because even most versions of BASIC going back 40+ years have a function similar to INKEY$, which checks to see if someone has typed a character, and if so, enables it to be handled if required, thus allowing processing to essentially continue uninterrupted.
That lack of ability seems to be a staggering step backwards despite the passage of time and breathtaking advancement in every other area.
We have a few papers on that subject.
Regarding the BASIC Inkey$ function, check the Textbox events for recent additions.
Thank you for those sources. My contribution to this discussion is that I've modifed the aproach used in the 'do-something' example so that a process that takes multiple timer periods for a single process (eg, scanning a bar code in this example) will turn off the timer when it's doing that process and turns it back on when it's finished.
This returns control back to the top level to given an opportunity for user input to influence what happens. Thus, if you've got a short timer interval a single loop may take multiple trigger time periods, but without triggering multiple instances of that process to queue up, while still allowing only a short interval between each 'loop', but which is long enough to check for other events.
