Why not easy Thread synchronization?

[Dave Brueck]

On Tue, 13 May 2003, Iwan van der Kleyn wrote:

> It's very easy writing simple  threaded programs in Python. In fact, its
> part of my "evangelize demo's" :-)
> However, thread synchroni(s/z)ation seems to be a bit more fussy and
> complex then,  for example, Java.

I dunno - most of the time when I want synchronization it's not around a
single method but several, and in the Java model I always got confused
because the syntax made it look like synchronization occurred around a
method and not an entire object.

> Why not a "synchronization" reserved word like in Java which takes care
> of "scary" bits under the hood?
>
> For example:
>
> sync def log(s):  #in which the hypothetical keyword 'sync' makes the
> function 'log' thread safe
> 	sys.stout.write(s)
> 	sys.stout.flush()
>
> Seems to be a bit more fitting to Python mucking about with locks and
> mutexes.

Couldn't you add something like that yourself (untested):

import threading
def MakeSynchronized(func):
  def f(*args, **kwargs):
    f.lock.acquire()
    try:
      return f.realfunc(*args, **kwargs)
    finally:
      f.lock.release()
  f.lock = threading.Lock()
  f.realfunc = func
  return f

And then you could take any function and make it synchronized:

def Log(what):
  sys.stdout.write(what)
  sys.stdout.flush()
Log = MakeSynchronized(Log)

-Dave