You can treat it like an exception (KeyboardInterrupt), like any other. Make a new file and run it from your shell with the following contents to see what I mean:

import time, sys

x = 1
while True:
    try:
        print x
        time.sleep(.3)
        x += 1
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        print "Bye"
        sys.exit()

I would do the following:

• define a custom exception
• call the callback function within an appropriate try/catch block
• if the callback function decides to break the execution, it will raise exception and the caller will catch it and handle it as needed.

Here's some pseudo-code:

class InterruptExecution (Exception):
    pass

def function_a():
    while some_condition_is_true():
        do_something()
        if callback_time():
            try:
                function_b()
            except InterruptExecution:
                break
        do_something_else()
    do_final_stuff()


def function_b():
    do_this_and_that()
    if interruption_needed():
        raise (InterruptExecution('Stop the damn thing'))

You can't get real-time without special hardware/software support. You don't need it in most cases (do you need to control giant robots?).

How to delay several function calls by known numbers of seconds depends on your needs e.g., if a time it takes to run a function is negligible compared to the delay between the calls then you could run all functions in a single thread:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from __future__ import print_function
from Tkinter import Tk

root = Tk()
root.withdraw() # don't show the GUI window
root.after(1000, print, 'foo') # print foo in a second
root.after(0, print, 'bar') # print bar in a jiffy
root.after(2000, root.destroy) # exit mainloop in 2 seconds
root.mainloop()
print("done")

It implements yours "I do not want the interrupts to interrupt each other either" because the next callback is not called until the previous one is complete.