To beep or not to beep.

[Karl Heuer]

In article <3538 at umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> halam2 at umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU (Haseen I. Alam) writes:
>But my main interest is to get the users attention.  Is beeping a BAD
>practice to do this?  How else can I get the users attention?

Why do you believe you've lost the user's attention in the first place?  What
kind of program are we talking about?

>I would like to know some other techniques.

If you're using (a modern version of) curses(), there is a pair of routines
beep() and flash() that are commonly used to indicate an error.  The polite
protocol is to allow the user to specify which one is desired:
	void error() { if (user_prefers_flash) flash(); else beep(); }
(If the hardware is not capable of both flash and beep, then the two routines
are equivalent.)

Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl at ima.ima.isc.com or harvard!ima!karl), The Walking Lint