process-pending-events

Arguments: nil

Processes any waiting events, and any arriving during processing, then returns leaving the event queue empty. We generally recommend that you put calls to process-pending-events in any cpu-intensive loops since doing so allows you to break out of the loop if necessary. If you execute a loop that turns out to be an infinite loop and there is no call to process-pending-events, it may not be possible to regain control and Lisp may fail.

On the other hand, calling process-pending-events can sometimes lead to obscure bugs since it can alter the order in which events are handled in a non-deterministic way. See About design considerations for event-driven applications in cgide.htm and post-funcall-in-cg-process.

If your application runs on platforms where Allegro threads are not native operating system threads, then you should probably call process-pending-events-if-event-handler instead of this function.

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This page was not revised from the 8.2 page.
Created 2012.5.30.