Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 Fluke 1/4/84; site fluke.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!fluke!joe From: joe@fluke.UUCP (Joe Kelsey) Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: Re: Symbolic WCHAN for 4.[12] ps. Message-ID: <1469@vax4.fluke.UUCP> Date: Fri, 16-Mar-84 12:17:37 EST Article-I.D.: vax4.1469 Posted: Fri Mar 16 12:17:37 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 18-Mar-84 08:11:16 EST References: <17289@sri-arpa.UUCP> <1793@rlgvax.UUCP> Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Everett, WA Lines: 20 The VMS implementation of ^T (on version 3.0 and later) imlements ^t as an out-of-band character which DCL catches and then prints some vaguely informative message. It has always seemed to me that UNIX needs some more flexible out-of-band character handling than the current mapping of specific control characters to signals. Notice the proliferation of character tables in the new tty driver to handle all of the Berkeley features. Many of these features could quite easily be handled with some sort of generalized break character mechanism - and probably more efficiently too! TOPS-20 has had user settable break masks ever since it was TENEX and VMS has also had more or less flexible break masks (In version 3.0, the break mask grew from 32 bits (control characters only) to variable sized masks from 8 bits to 256 bits (all 8-bit ASCII characters!) Some things, like command completion and prompting (added to the csh using the only break character allowed!) would work much better with a read termination mask instead of signals. It's probably too late to try to pull out all of the local character garbage from the new tty driver and replace it with some sort of more flexible mechanism, but it's a nice wish. Too bad I don't have the time to really think about doing it... /Joe