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From: walton@tybalt.caltech.edu (Steve Walton)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d,comp.terminals,comp.emacs
Subject: Re: VT100's keeping up at high baud rates
Message-ID: <3036@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: Wed, 17-Jun-87 12:34:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: cit-vax.3036
Posted: Wed Jun 17 12:34:05 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Jun-87 10:11:38 EDT
References: <5490@think.UUCP>
Sender: news@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu
Reply-To: walton@tybalt.caltech.edu (Steve Walton)
Followup-To: comp.terminals
Organization: Calfornia Institute of Technology
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Xref: mnetor comp.sources.d:862 comp.terminals:319 comp.emacs:1175

In article <5490@think.UUCP> rlk@THINK.COM writes:
>It's amazing how easy it is to avoid externally-visible flow control
>if you really try.  The answer is buffering.

(I hate flow control flames.) As a naive user, what happens to the
contents of your enormous buffer when I hit an interrupt character
(^C)?  Won't the contents of your buffer (which could be a few hundred
characters) get dumped to my screen?  And how do I pause terminal
output?  If your buffer recognizes ^S, what happens if it fills up
before I hit ^Q?  (At 38Kbaud, 1 MB of buffer would fill in a bit over
4 minutes).  And if your buffer recognizes ^S, then how do I use it as
an emacs command? Finally, if we just dump data fast into a buffer
which then hands it to a display (or a protocol-based file transfer
program) which can't keep up, eventually the buffer will fill up
anyway.  What then?
	Look, can we cool it?  There are circumstances where you just
*have to have* in-band flow control, and like it or not, ^S/^Q are the
universal standard for it.  The *only* place this matters is Emacs
flavors which use these as commands, and said Emacsen are sufficiently
customizable to allow them to use something else if you need the flow
control.
	I've directed followups to comp.terminals only.

    Steve Walton, guest as walton@tybalt.caltech.edu
    AMETEK Computer Research Division, ametek!walton@csvax.caltech.edu
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