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From: saunders@batcomputer.TN.CORNELL.EDU (saunders)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Help with Red Ryder
Message-ID: <194@batcomputer.TN.CORNELL.EDU>
Date: Wed, 30-Apr-86 13:16:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: batcompu.194
Posted: Wed Apr 30 13:16:34 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 4-May-86 04:41:13 EDT
References: <384@druhi.UUCP>
Reply-To: saunders@batcomputer.UUCP (saunders)
Organization: Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY
Lines: 43
Keywords: control key(s)

In article <384@druhi.UUCP> cosmos@druhi.UUCP (GuestRA) writes:
>using the Option keys as the control key doesn't seem to work right 

Glory, glory, to Apple, and to the wise old man who takes care of their
keyboard development.  This is NOT a BUG, sir, this is a FEATURE of the
*wonderful* Macintosh keyboard driver.  You may recall that the Mac is
an "international" machine . . . so, those characters which are used to
produce accents, cedillas, etc. (they're all option-key combinations,
E, I, N, & U--there's a formal name for this class of character, but I
forget it), are trapped, and if the next character takes one of those,
the WONDERFUL keyboard driver MAGICALLY produces the correctly accented
foreign character!

Alas, to produce the character itself you must type it TWICE.  

In this way, the wise old man of Apple guaranteed that the option key
would drive programmers writing communication programs crazy, since
there is no way of disabling this MARVELOUS FEATURE so one can
conveniently produce control characters using the (otherwise useless)
option key, nor is the action of the keyboard driver properly
documented (or documented at all, except for those lucky souls who
possess early versions of Inside Mac, which has the story but gets it
slightly wrong).  The only way for the poor programmer to avoid this
MOST LOVELY ***FEATURE*** is to trap the calls to the key interpreter &
catch the nasty combinations before the interpreter gets 'em.

As you can guess, I've spent some time on this.  You might also be able 
to guess that I don't think much of the way this software was written 
(c'mon, guys, at least give us SOME WAY of disabling this kluge!).  
Nor do I much care for the Mac Plus keyboard, which misplaces a bunch 
of keys (programs written to make things convenient on the one keyboard 
make things very INconvenient on the other).

Well, barf on Apple anyway, I bet they won't even be able to design a
decent UNIX machine.


Color Me Irate,
kevin
-- 
kevin eric saunders
ARPA: kevin@lasspvax   or   kevin%lasspvax.tn.cornell.edu@cu-arpa
UUCP: {ihnp4, allegra,...}!cornell!lasspvax!kevin