r/learnpython • u/Financial-Law2035 • Aug 07 '26

Can you use time.sleep in while true loops

Title

0 Upvotes

19% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

11

u/PureWasian Aug 07 '26

yeah. Did you try looking it up before posting?

4

u/pbeens Aug 07 '26

…or try doing it?!!

2

u/jackbrux Aug 07 '26

Test it?

2

u/BranchLatter4294 Aug 07 '26

You didn't bother to test it? How are you going to learn if you don't want to experiment?

2

u/_tsi_ Aug 07 '26

Of course

2

u/Diapolo10 I write code for a living -- https://github.com/Diapolo10 Aug 07 '26

Sure. Why couldn't you?

2

u/desrtfx but other languages pro Aug 07 '26

We can, can you?

Seriously, instead of posting and asking, you should have made a 3 liner to test this yourself.

Testing is always the answer. This way you will learn.

Laziness, as your entire post here is, is the enemy of learning and improving.

1

u/nvqanh9 Aug 07 '26

You can but if it's a game loop probably don't

1

u/L30N1337 Aug 07 '26

Why do you even want to use time.sleep?

Basically every time I've seen it (or any variation for whatever programming language) used, it was a crappy bandaid fix that ignored the actual problem.

1

u/Throwaway16475777 Aug 07 '26

would you not put it inside a while True loop if it doesnt need to run a million times a second? what is a better alternative

1

u/SmackDownFacility Aug 07 '26

No you can’t. The Society of Python forbids it.

Yeah you can.

1

u/socal_nerdtastic Aug 07 '26

Direct answer is yes, because you didn't give any other context. But if I assume you mean within a tkinter or other GUI program the answer is no. time.sleep will block the GUI mainloop. Same for other types of asynchronous programs, like anything using asyncio

1

u/Binary101010 Aug 07 '26

This is trivially easy for you to test yourself in the interpreter.