asynchronous alarm

[Alan Isaac]

Goal: turn off an audible alarm without
terminating the program.  For example,
suppose a console program is running::

        while True:
                sys.stdout.write('\a')
                sys.stdout.flush()
                time.sleep(0.5)

I want to add code to allow me to turn off
this alarm and then interact with the
program in its new state (which the alarm
alerts me to).

Question: how best to do this mostly simply
in a console application and in a Tkinter application?

I realize this must be a standard problem so that there
is a good standard answer.  Here are some naive solutions
that occured to me.

Solution C1 (console): poll keyboard inside the loop.
E.g., <URL:http://effbot.org/librarybook/msvcrt.htm>
Problem: no platform independent way to do this?

Solution C2 (console): handle KeyboardInterrupt.
An ugly hack. But works fine.

Solution C3 (console): start alarm in one thread
and wait for raw_input.  (Should that be in another
thread?  It does not seem to matter.)
This seems plausible, but I know nothing about threads
except that nonprogrammers tend to make mistakes
with them, so I hesitate.

Solution G1 (gui): start alarm in a thread but
include a test for a variable that can be set
by a button push?  (Sounds plausible etc.)

Solution G2 (gui): start alarm but
somehow let Tkinter listen for an event
without programming any threads. Possible??

Thanks,
Alan