Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!seismo!brl-adm!adm!jfjr@mitre-bedford.arpa
From: jfjr@mitre-bedford.arpa
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: TURBO Pascal READ
Message-ID: <7068@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 23-Apr-87 13:46:18 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.7068
Posted: Thu Apr 23 13:46:18 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Apr-87 06:44:43 EST
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 35


  I noticed similar behavior and wrote about it to info-ibmpc
last summer. MS-DOS screws up buffering input into pascal
programs (turbo-pascal) at least. I wrote a simple program

program test(input,output);

var ch:char;

begin
writeln('enter character');
read(ch);
writeln(ch);
end.

(its been a while since I wrote pascal so to anybody who will
remark on any syntax/semantic errors rest assured those battles
were fought last summer)

If you compile and run this with Turbo (com option)
and respond with a string say "abc", then the
program will run correctly the first time, echoing an a. The second time
you run it it will ignore you're input, whatever that may be and
echo a 'b'. This will go on until the string 'abc' including cr and lf
are consumed. I should back off a little. I havent tried it
since last summer and turbo and/or MS-DOS might have been fixed

since then but it drove me nuts then. The moral of this story
(I have had similar input buffering problems with stdin in
Micro-soft C) is that one should be very careful with 
standard input, console etc on an MS-DOS machine.

By the way it didn't seem to matter what compiler options I chose

                                       Jerry Freedman,Jr