[jawsscripts] Pause versus Delay
- From: "Jim Snowbarger" <Snowman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jawsscripts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 May 2012 21:26:37 -0500
Have any of you guys ever sussed out the subtle differences between pause and
delay? I know what FSDN says about it, but that description doesn't seem
particularly enlightening or precise to me.
What does it do behind the scenes? Does jaws get suspended allowing other
programs to run for both? Or, just for the pause. From the description,
delay doesn't do that. So, when you are delaying, what happens to the rest of
your running applications.
I get the impression that they are blocked.
I have always modeled this jaws scrip machine in my head as a single execution
thread, with a single priority interrupt. The main thread runs your scripts
and the functions they call. the interrupts represent events.
I know you can run a loop containing a pause statement, waiting for an event to
fire.
I don't know if delay allows that, or it will forestall the event.
Anyway, do you think that is an accurate model?
I am poking into this because of some serious problems I am having with some
custom scripts that work fine under jaws 5, and jaws 10, but have issues, as
they say, with jaws 13. More about that perhaps as I learn it.
But, in general, I am finding that lots of things don't work quite the same in
jaws 13, and I'm having to chase down the anomalies. Great sport, isn't it?
Hunting down the latest batch of jaws quirks? Keep your old versions handy!
But anyway, one thing I know about these two builtins is that they behave
differently if you press a key.
For example, consider the following fragment as part of a script
SayString ("start")
Let i = 20
while (i > 0)
; delay(5)
Pause()
Let i = i-1
EndWhile
SayString ("stop")
Notice that delay is commented out, and pause is not. You might want to flip
that around when experimenting.
This total loop takes 2 seconds, no matter which builtin you use, implying that
Pause is also a 100 millisecond delay, which is what I always believed.
But, one subtle difference is that delay is canceled by keyboard input.
Pause is not.
With delay, once you press a key, all calls to the delay builtin are canceled
until the running script terminates.
This means that, if your script really needs to do the delay before it takes
some other action, that action is going to be done prematurely if a key is
pressed.
This is true in jaws 10, my favorite, and jaws 13, and probably most if not
all others.
So what do you experts know about pause versus delay?
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