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Newbie question : What is a thread?

Aahz Maruch aahz at panix.com
Fri Dec 29 11:14:49 EST 2000 
In article <92hod8$298$1 at nnrp1.deja.com>,  <judi_ahivodji at yahoo.fr> wrote:
>
>I'm a beginner in Python an I would like someone to tell me what is a
>thread and/or where I can find other deep explanations about it.

A thread is a unit of program control that is used to keep track of
which statement is being executed.  It's similar to a "process" (and a
process is essentially equivalent to "one running program").  However,
each process can have multiple threads inside it, and the threads all
share that one process's memory.

Threads are useful because of that shared memory (making communication
between parts of a large program somewhat simpler than inter-process
communication).  Threads are also usually faster to context-switch than
processes are, because the computer has to store less information for a
thread than a process.

For a brief not-tutorial, see http://starship.python.net/crew/aahz/
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