In general

A token is an object that can tell you whether to continue the action you started, or whether it has already been canceled.

There are 4 types of tokens in this library:

• SimpleToken
• ConditionToken
• TimeoutToken
• CounterToken

Each of them has its own characteristics, but they also have something in common:

• Each token can be canceled manually, and some types of tokens can cancel themselves when a condition or timeout occurs. It doesn't matter how the token was canceled, you work with it the same way.

• All types of tokens are thread-safe and can be used from multiple threads/coroutines. However, they are not intended to be shared from multiple processes.

• Token cancellation is a one-way operation. A token that has already been cancelled cannot be restored.

• All token classes are inherited from AbstractToken and have a single interface that defines how they can be canceled, how to find out their status, how to expect their cancellation and much more. If you are writing a function that accepts an unknown token type, you can use AbstractToken to hint types:

from cantok import AbstractToken

def function(token: AbstractToken):
  ...