Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: making characters disappear
Message-ID: <15302@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 23 Feb 91 20:14:32 GMT
References: <1991Feb23.014700.16507@ico.isc.com> <1991Feb19.015727.2223@to.rushpc> <1991Feb23.170142.538@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 16

In article <1991Feb23.170142.538@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) writes:
>That is because it SHOULD be possible to do such very common things
>as non-echo reading or reading single characters without terminating
>carriage returns. We should be discussing how to put this into the
>next standardized version of the language. It SHOULD have been in the
>present version. 

I don't think you would find many (if any) people among those who have
carefully considered what needed to go into the C standard, who would
agree with you.  This is clearly a very system-specific notion; there
are C environments where the notion makes no sense.  The C standard
addresses (for hosted environments only) just the minimum universally-
implementable support necessary for useful applications across all
hosted environments.  There are other standards, such as POSIX.1, that
address more system-specific features, and that is an appropriate way
to deal with them.