Thank you for your replies Jeff & Tim. The snippet I submitted is unfortunate, since I was writing an example (for a Python course I am going to give in September) to show that you cannot reliably assume that you will get exactly 9 dots, because of the limitations of 'sleep'. Mindlessly, I have cut & pasted that snippet, but my real question was not "how many dots I get", it was: "why the error message talks about 'thread' not being in the globals?" It's true that I can avoid it with a thread.join() (which I had forgot), but still I really cannot understand the reason for such message. Why it is so misleading? Can something be done about it? TIA, Michele Simionato
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