Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!unix.cis.pitt.edu!dsinc!bagate!cbmvax!cbmehq!cbmger!peterk
From: peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Mac and Amiga (Games--Macintosh vs A500)
Message-ID: <971@cbmger.UUCP>
Date: 18 Mar 91 17:40:40 GMT
References: <9103101900.AA19362@enuxha.eas.asu.edu> <12014@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY)
Organization: Commodore Bueromaschinen GmbH, West Germany
Lines: 31

In article <12014@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> navas@cory.Berkeley.EDU writes:
>
>Not that I am trying to say the Amiga is any better -- to cancel an Amiga
>requester, you can hit the <cancel> box (which is nice), or you can use
>Amiga-B (which is not intuitive either).

This topic was discussed heavily among developers. The result is:
Those key combinations are INTENTIONALLY UNUSUAL! Again this comes
from the issue that you have to consider multitasking at every moment.
When an Amiga system requester appears, its window is instantly
activated, so every key press goes into this requester window.
Now, if they chose some "normal" keys  to answer the requester, the
following might happen:
A user is deep inside his wordprocessor (or a vi clone), that also
uses the Esc key heavily. Now the user is just about to press this
key, when a requester from a quite different process appears. The
Esc key goes into the requester window and causes a valuable answer,
before the user at all noticed what happened. And he might have taken
a very bad selection for his actual case through Esc. - Please don't
consider this scenario as of too low probability. It CAN happen, and
Murphy lives, so it WILL happen, and blame would be on the OS.
So now you know why the system designers HAD to choose those funny
keys for system control. (Perhaps on a monotasking system this could
be solved differently, but multitasking needs some additional considering.)

BTW, had to cancel crossposting to comp.sys.mac.misc, our cbm newsfeed
doesn't know this (bogus?) newsgroup :-)).

-- 
Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel  // E-Mail to  \\  Only my personal opinions... 
Commodore Frankfurt, Germany  \X/ {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk