Re: wait and spurious wakeups

Hello,

I have two threads, one is rcving events that cause a list to have
items appended, the other is going to return the list as soon as the
last item is added. A special event occurs when there are no more
items to add. (please dont ask why it works this way, this is due to
the mandatory use of a third-party API that forces this on us). The
first thread calls notify when the special event occurs, the second
thread calls wait before returning the list of items.

Here is my question: what is wrong with calling wait just as wait()?
The developer I am working with claims that wait suffers from the
potential to experience interrupts and spuirous wakeups. Is that
right? He suggested that the following code be used:

synchronized (listOwner) {
    while (special event not received)
    {
        listOwner.wait();
    }
}

Can someone explain this to me please? I have tried talking to the
developer but there is a communication problem (different timezones,
different languages).

I have checked the java web page http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/lang/Object.html#wait()
where it says that wait() can get InterruptedException, but that is
only if another thread interrupts the current thread. There is no way
that thread 1 can interrupt thread 2 that I am aware of. I wonder what
is being referred to here.