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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!osu-eddie!paul
From: paul@osu-eddie.UUCP (Paul Placeway)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: dumber terminal device drivers
Message-ID: <211@osu-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 1-Apr-85 11:50:24 EST
Article-I.D.: osu-eddi.211
Posted: Mon Apr  1 11:50:24 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 2-Apr-85 04:55:07 EST
References: <327@piggy.UUCP> <2536@nsc.UUCP>
Reply-To: paul@osu-eddie.UUCP (Paul Placeway)
Distribution: net
Organization: Ohio State Univ., CIS Dept., Cols, Oh.
Lines: 19
Summary: 


Actually what is needed is a dispatch table for the keys rather than the
current method.  The problem is that the Unix drivers want to be told which
key does a given function, rather than which function is invoked by a given
key.  The result is that you can only have one key to do the DEL function at
a time (for example).  If you supported the META (ie. 8th bit set) keys, and
had 16 different functions (4 bits/character), each terminals map would take
up 128 bytes of memory.  This might seem excessive (2K for 16 terminals),
but it allows you to make any number of keys do any function (for vi, for
example, ESC, CR, NL, and various control characters would do a wake up).
The other advantage is that the processing characters is much quicker
because you only have to do a table lookup folowed by a shift and mask
rather than 13 compairs to find what a function is.

				Paul W. Placeway
				The Ohio State University
				(UUCP: ...!cbosgd!osu-eddie!paul)
				(CSNet: paul@ohio-state)
				(ARPA: paul%ohio-state.csnet@CSNET-RELAY)