Advanced Python Programming

A note about blocking functions

As you have seen, we have to replace our original time.sleep() function with its equivalent from the asyncio module. This is because time.sleep() is, by nature, a blocking function, which means that it cannot be used to implement a task switching event. To test this, in our Chapter17/example2.py file (our asynchronous program), we will replace the following line of code:

await asyncio.sleep(delay)

The preceding code will be replaced with the following code:

time.sleep(delay)

After running this new script, your output will simply be the same as that of our original sequential, synchronous program. So, replacing await asyncio.sleep() with time.sleep() actually converts our program back to synchronous, ignoring ...