Using Object.wait(millisec) to simulate sleep

Question

Here\'s a snippet of code that I saw in some code I\'m maintaining.

Object lock = new Object();

synchronized( lock ) 
{
   try
   {
       lock.wait( 50000          


        

Answer 1

Aside from having to get a monitor before waiting() there's no major difference anymore so long as no one external is going to be .notify()ing.

In ancient Java code you'd see people using wait() instead of Thread.sleep() because Thread.sleep() would freeze the whole application on systems without preemptive multitasking (I'm looking at you OS9). Technically wait() also let's you use nano-resolution waits, but in practice they're seldom that accurate.