scratch 1.4 is sometimes good for a surprise. In school, a program of a pupil reacted unexpected: Obviously the event driven script did not complete operation, but was stopped by a second event.

A detailed analysis lead to this test code, demonstrating the behavior of event triggered code.

One of the observations are that scratch event handling is not multithreaded, but a new event stops current processing and restarts script.

The sample here uses a simple script, triggered by ‘tick’ event. On entry, a variable ‘a’ is incremented, on exit of the script the variable is decremented. When the script is executed from start to end, then the variable will have same value at the end as at the beginning.

Triggering this script with a ‘slow’ loop (use ‘s’ key), uses a loop with two sec delay. In this scenario, the variable keeps the value.

Using the ‘fast’ loop (use ‘f’-key), the script receives a new tick event when just in the middle of operation. Obviously the script gets interrupted and restarts from beginning. This is clearly visible, as the variable gets incremented.

The ‘c’ key resets the logic.

The full scratch code 1.4 code is here for download broadcast_event_handling.sb.