Keyboard support in C (was Re: making charact

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <10530 at dog.ee.lbl.gov> torek at elf.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek) writes:
>(This is why the tty interfaces on Unix boxes are so complicated.  Perhaps
>not all of the complexity is needed, but as yet, no one has figured out
>how to get rid of it.)

Another important point is that, for most applications, users expect
to have their typed input "canonicalized", e.g. to be allowed to
backspace over mistyped characters.  The UNIX terminal handler normally
provides this service in a uniform manner for th evast majority of
applications; only those that attempt their own "fancy" input handling
override this default terminal-handler support.  If the stdio routines
were to defeat input canonicalization when input comes from a terminal
(even if only after a NULL setbuf), most UNIX users would find the
application behavior to be surprising and annoying.