Daily Archives: 31 March, 2006

Emmanuel: if you are using a language like Python, you can let the language keep track of your state machine for something like that:

def load_items(treeview, liststore, items):
    for obj in items:
        liststore.append((obj.get_foo(),
                          obj.get_bar(),
                          obj.get_baz()))
        yield True
    treeview.set_model(liststore)
    yield False

def lazy_load_items(treeview, liststore, items):
    gobject.idle_add(load_items(treeview, liststore, item).next)

Here, load_items() is a generator that will iterate over a sequence like [True, True, ..., True, False]. The next() method is used to get the next value from the iterator. When used as an idle function with this particular generator, it results in one item being added to the list store per idle call til we get to the end of the generator body where the “yield False” statement results in the idle function being removed.

For a lot of algorithms, this removes the need to design and debug a state machine equivalent. Of course, it is possible to do similar things in C but that’s even more obscure 🙂.