Newsgroups: comp.std.c Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: ReadKey like Function in C Message-ID: <1989Aug13.004423.28265@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology 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> Date: Sun, 13 Aug 89 00:44:23 GMT In article <3727@buengc.BU.EDU> bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) writes: >>awarded a "VE" stock response code, meaning: The Standard must >>accommodate a variety of environments. > >I don't get it. > >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. And how does that magically translate into standards compliance from compiler vendors? The result of such a requirement will be that the people who have trouble implementing it will ignore it. Thus defeating one major purpose of standardization, which is to give the users a guarantee of what they can portably expect. >The Compiler writers are in a much better position to implement >it than are a bunch of fractious C programmers arguing over >whether to use fstat() or ioctl() and the length of timeout()... If you think these are the sorts of issues that come up in implementing such a requirement, you have overlooked the fact that Unix is not the whole world, and these days the majority of C implementations are not for Unix. It's much worse in the real world. -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu