Threads in Python

Before we jump into more detail about the life of a thread, I feel it's important to know what we are going to be instantiating in real terms. In order to know this, however, we'll need to have a look at Python's Thread class definition which can be found in threading.py.

Within this file, you should see the class definition for the Thread class. This has a constructor function which looks something like this:

# Python Thread class Constructor
def __init__(self, group=None, target=None, name=None,
args=(), kwargs=None, verbose=None):

This preceding constructor takes in five real arguments, which are defined within that class definition as follows:

• group: This is a special parameter which is reserved for a future extension.
• target:This is the callable object to be invoked by the run() method. If not passed, this will default to None, and nothing will be started.
• name:This is the thread name.
• args:This is the argument tuple for target invocation. It defaults to ().
• kwargs: This is...