Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!yale!husc6!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: ^O in EMACS Message-ID: <10521@s.ms.uky.edu> Date: 4 Nov 88 04:59:29 GMT References: <8811012301.AA08441@ETN-WLV.EATON.COM> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 22 The flippant response (to the question about why any application would use funny characters) is that if the system doesn't allow interaction with a terminal using the entire character set, then that system is brain-dead. (A notable instance is PR1ME which is fine except there is no way short of calling some really-really- really-really low-level kernal routines to get a ^J to be read by a program). The non-flippant reasponse is "why not?". Also, what's so standard about, for instance, ^O. Yeah some operating systems use that for special purposes, but nowhere near all of them. What's so "standard" about ^S/^Q (another pair which causes headaches for emacs). For one thing it's not standard, but it's also rather braindead to have a system which uses in-band signaling to do flow control. Not only is it slow and error prone, it decreases the "bandwidth". I don't mean to inflame anybody, and I apologize if I have. -- <-- David Herron; an MMDF guy <-- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <-- <-- Controlled anarchy -- the essence of the net.