Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!calvin!richard
From: richard@calvin.EE.CORNELL.EDU (Richard Brittain)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: ReadKey like Function in C
Message-ID: <1255@calvin.EE.CORNELL.EDU>
Date: 22 Aug 89 07:08:25 GMT
References: <148@trigon.UUCP> <225800206@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <19095@mimsy.UUCP> <17228@ut-emx.UUCP> <13653@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: richard@calvin.spp.cornell.edu (Richard Brittain)
Organization: Cornell Space Plasma Physics Group
Lines: 27

In article <13653@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> scs@adam.pika.mit.edu (Steve Summit) writes:
>I don't know why control-C's are polled under DOS; the low-level
>keyboard scan codes do come in as true interrupts, so a proper,
>asynchronous control-C interrupt could have been generated.
>
	Actually, control-break generates a very low-level asynchronous interrupt
 which will get out of most problems, but the default handler for this interrupt
just empties the keyboard buffer and sticks a ^C in there, because it doesn't
know if it is "safe" to terminate the program.  I suspect if you installed your
own control-break handler you could break out of many of these wonderful little
1-liners that lock up our pc's , but it probably would introduce it's own 
problems.

My own 2 cents on the question of standardising single character unbuffered i/o:

It seems to me that what is needed is not only a reliable way to perform single
character keyboard reads, but also an easy way to detect function key use.  I
know that you can do this if you have curses/terminfo AND you are prepared to
meet miscellaneous operating system gremlims face to face.  Unix has a
reputation for being user hostile, and isn't this perhaps because writing a 
nice user interface without standardised, portable routines is such a pain
that hardly anyone bothers to even attempt it. 
 
Richard Brittain,                   School of Elect. Eng.,  Upson Hall   
                                    Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
ARPA: richard@calvin.spp.cornell.edu	
UUCP: {uunet,uw-beaver,rochester,cmcl2}!cornell!calvin!richard