Question

I am making a primitive time keeper that I would like to pause and resume with the simple press of a key. I’ve been told that

system("pause>null")

pauses the program until a key is hit, but how is the conditional written to pause to begin with?

Preferred structure in pseudo-code:

if (certain_key_pressed)
{
    pause_program_until_any_key_hit;
}

Answer 1

There are 2 idioms to choose from here. Polling or event driven programming.

Polling is the more simple but often less elegant solution where the program would periodically check to see if the pause button has been hit within a loop.

While(not_quit)
{
    if(key_pressed)
        Etc...

In event driven programming, you would register the pauseButtonPressed event with an event handler. When the pause button is pressed, a special function assigned the task of handling the event would call the pause function.