What does timeout mean?

A limit on how long to wait for something before giving up and doing something else, so a program is never stuck forever waiting for a reply that does not come.

Also written as: timeouts, times out

In a lesson

A question is a message you send and then wait for the answer to. ask does both: it sends, then polls for up to a second, and returns the first reply, or None if nothing came. Radios miss things; a program that waits forever for a reply that never comes is stuck, so the timeout is part of the protocol too.

Learn it

• Taught in 9.3 Protocols Talking to each other, Robot club

Used in

• F10.7 Protocols
• 5.3 Timers
• 8.6 Tuning itself
• U8.2 The inverse sensor model
• U8.5 Ray casting the map

All glossary terms