Tcl Alarm

Alright, I have laid the ground work for our helper program, now let's see what Tcl can do:

First, we might have multiple things to wait for, and we want to see how much time is left, not just rely on a single sound to notify us:

set $var $tm
lappend ::dl $var
lappend ::al $var

pack [frame .tMain.f$var] -side top -expand 1 -fill x
pack [label .tMain.lT$var -text $tx] -in .tMain.f$var -side left
pack [label .tMain.l$var] -in .tMain.f$var -side right

This is actually a function (proc addLine {var tm tx}), so I can add lines programmatically.

The "lines" are placed in the window, each one representing a timer counting down.
You have parameters:

• var - the variable which will hold the time, this is displayed elsewhere, so it can be descriptive, and is used inside functions, so it needs the global namespace like "::zombies" or "::arena"
• tm - the time (in seconds) until the event
• tx - the text description for the window
  

al and dl are global lists. dl is used for decrementing the timers, al is all the timers available (for listing the timers to reset)

Now, when we want to decrement all the timers:

proc decList {il} {
  upvar $il l

  # foreach variable in the list
  foreach iu $l {
     upvar $iu i

     # decrement it
     incr i -1

     # update the GUI
     .tMain.l$iu configure -text [tformat $i]

     # check for timer expire
     if {$i == 0} {
        # remove the timer from the list
        set idx [lsearch $l $iu]
        set l [lreplace $l $idx $idx]

        # flash the text
        after 1000 ".tMain.lT$iu configure -fg #008800"
        after 5000 ".tMain.lT$iu configure -fg #000000"

        playSound
     }
  }
}

The upvar may not be needed, I was trying to work around not using globals...

tformat is my "time format". It converts a number of seconds into a nice "35 m 0 s" or "1 h 0 m 50 s" string for pretty display. It is left as an exercise for the reader.