Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!texbell!uhnix1!splut!jay From: jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard) Newsgroups: comp.std.c Subject: Re: ReadKey like Function in C Message-ID: <2823@splut.conmicro.com> Date: 13 Aug 89 13:50:29 GMT References: <148@trigon.UUCP> <207600029@s.cs.uiuc.edu> <941@lakesys.UUCP> <21175@cup.portal.com> <3705@buengc.BU.EDU> <10712@smoke.BRL.MIL> <3727@buengc.BU.EDU> Reply-To: jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard) Organization: Confederate Microsystems, League City, TX Lines: 24 In article <3727@buengc.BU.EDU> bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) writes: >All it's gotta say is something to the effect that there should >be a function, call it "readkey()", that returns the value of >the next char from stdin as soon after it's typed as it's needed. >You could even qualify it to apply only when tty input can be >used as stdin. Let's look at an environment where this is not possible: IBM 370-class mainframe, with stdin (and /dev/tty??) pointed at a 3270 terminal. Characters are not sent to the host until ENTER (or a PF key) is pressed. There's no way to give a character to a program as soon as it's typed because the CPU doesn't know that it has. Your readkey() cannot be implemented in this environment, yet it is a valid one for ANSI C. (Flames about how 3270s are horribly broken sent to /dev/null; there are millions of them out there, doing real work every day.) (Anyone at Amdahl wanna comment on UTS's 3270 handling?) -- Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can jay@splut.conmicro.com (eieio)| adequately be explained by stupidity. {attctc,bellcore}!texbell!splut!jay +---------------------------------------- "Rabid rerouters *love* to route mail to devnull@hell.org" - Brandon Allbery