ReadKey like Function in C

[Henry Spencer]

In article <225800206 at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>>I strongly suggest that you read IEEE standard 1003.1, i.e. POSIX, before
>>re-inventing the wheel pointlessly.  POSIX compliance will be widespread
>>in the very near future...
>
>Posix fooey!!!!!! Posix is a standard for one and only one OS, not
>a language standard. IT WILL BE OF ZERO repeat ZERO utility...

Nonsense.  While POSIX is a standard for one operating system, many people
will be trying hard to make their own pet system POSIX-compliant, or as
POSIX-compliant as possible.  (I would expect OS/2 to provide POSIX
compliance at some point, for example.)  The point is, the POSIX way of
doing things is the closest there is to an OS-independent standard; your
odds of finding it on your new system from XYZ Vaporboxes Inc. are thus
fairly good.  Not certain -- XYZ may not be able to support it at all --
but if it can be done in any practical way, odds are good that there will
be software support that makes it look like the POSIX way.

>This MUST be IN THE LANGUAGE STANDARD!!!!!! It MUST MUST MUST be there
>(do you begin to feel the flame???) to FORCE vendors to, if necessary,
>FIX THEIR OPERATING SYSTEMS SO IT WILL WORK...

Language standards do not and cannot force vendors to do anything.
Especially if the vendor is IBM -- one of the major problem areas with
any character-at-a-time-read function -- which simply cannot be bullied
by anything short of the US government.  (It is not clear that even the
US government can successfully bully IBM on an issue IBM cares about,
but anybody less massive definitely can't.)

Please get it through your head that standards committees have far less
clout than you think.  The question is not whether, say, IBM will be
forced to spend millions complying; the question is whether IBM will
accept the standard or ignore it.  If you want to see a standard in wide
use, you very badly want IBM to accept it.  This may be ugly but it's
the way the world works.
-- 
V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu