Getchar w/wout echo

Scott Wilson swilson%thetone at Sun.COM
Wed Aug 31 05:49:29 AEST 1988


In article <731 at ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM> mercer at ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM (Dan Mercer) writes:
>Terminal echo is a function provided by the
>operating system (in this case,  UNIX(tm)).

Who said we were talking about UNIX?  Again, for the nth time, the environment
in question is THINK's Lightspeed C 3.0 running on a Macintosh under MacOS.
There are no terminals, terminal drivers, terminal emulation windows, stty,
or ioctl's.  Any terminal emulation is provided by the C runtime libraries.

Under UNIX, echoing clearly falls under the realm of the operating system
and it would be wrong for a language to specify something that it can't
or shouldn't control.  I think the real question is that in abscence of OS
support for terminals (or interactive input) should the C environment be
forced to provide a "normal" input mechanism including echoing and maybe
primitive line editing.

--
Scott Wilson		arpa: swilson at sun.com
Sun Microsystems	uucp: ...!sun!swilson
Mt. View, CA



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