Thinking about cross-platform issues. I found this, from the venerable Tim Peters to be enlightening for python's choice of design:
"It's possible to build a better Queue implementation that runs only on POSIX systems, or only on Windows systems, or only on one of a dozen other less-popular target platforms. The current implementation works fine on all of them, although is suboptimal compared to what could be done in platform-specific Queue implementations. " Here is a link: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/messages/011f680b2dac320c,a03b161980b81d89,1162a30e96ae330a,0db1e52548493843,6b8d593c84ad4fd4,b6293a53f98252ce,82cddc89805b4b56,81c7289cc4cb4441,0906b24cc1534844,3ff6629391074ed4?thread_id=55b80d05e9d54705&mode=thread&noheader=1&q=queue+timeout+python#doc_011f680b2dac320c The whole thread (oops a pun) is worth a read. john -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
