Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!mordor!joyce!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Getchar w/wout echo
Message-ID: <313@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 25 Aug 88 00:59:38 GMT
References: <371@marob.MASA.COM> <225800052@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <65197@sun.uucp> <302@quintus.UUCP> <1988Aug23.164855.26679@utzoo.uucp> <309@quintus.UUCP> <65474@sun.uucp>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
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In article <65474@sun.uucp> swilson@sun.UUCP (Scott Wilson) writes:
>>Who _cares_ how much baggage comes with Curses?
>I care, other people care.  Some of us are developing C programs
>on machines like the Macintosh where you are trying to fit your
>OS stuff, your C programming tools, and your C project onto two
>800K floppies.  This is comp.lang.c, not comp.lang.c.on.a.big.machine.
>with.megabytes.of.disk.space.and.maybe.paging.  Size is important.
>And curses is not universally available.

My word, how things have changed!  Little wee IBM PCs running MS-DOS
are now "big.machines.with.megabytes.of.disk.space.and.maybe.paging"!
(I believe that there is a version of Curses for the Atari ST, too.)
If you are working on a Macintosh, POSIX features aren't going to help
you one tiny little bit either.

What in the world is wrong with taking the bits of the Curses *interface*
that you need, specifically the functions echo() and noecho(), and using
them in your code?  Ok, in the Macintosh version of your program, you will
have to write a small Macintosh-specific file to implement them.  Do
everyone a favour:  post the sources to comp.sys.apple.mac or whatever it
is called.  That's the way to produce a de facto standard, and that's how
we'll get echo control in the next version of ANSI C.