Chapter 14. Handling Events

“You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Some programs work with direct user input, such as mouse and keyboard interaction. The timing and order of such input can’t be predicted in advance. This requires a different approach to control flow than the one we have used so far.

Event Handlers

Imagine an interface where the only way to find out whether a key on the keyboard is being pressed is to read the current state of that key. To be able to react to keypresses, you would have to constantly read the key’s state so that you’d catch it before it’s released again. It would be dangerous to perform other time-intensive computations ...

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