Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!willett!GEnie
From: GEnie@willett.UUCP (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Category 10,  Topic 28
Message-ID: <72.UUL1.3#5129@willett.UUCP>
Date: 22 Dec 89 03:30:13 GMT
Organization: Latest Link in ForthNet Chain
Lines: 36

Message 104       Thu Dec 21, 1989
R.BERKEY [Robert]            at 01:07 PST
 
  To: Roedy Green

 RG> 7.0635  ?KEY
 RG>     Bring back good old ?TERMINAL.  If the DOS is so stupid
 RG>     that ?TERMINAL is impossible, let the implementor
 RG>     fake it with a buffer or leave it out.  Why penalize
 RG>     all of us to be compatible with brain-damaged operating
 RG>     systems?

What I recall is that ?TERMINAL , as per the fig-FORTH model, is an operator
to detect the BREAK signal (the "129th" ASCII character) on an RS232
interface.

While I agree that the general good should outweigh awkwardnesses for
functionally-incomplete operating systems, I'm not recognizing what the
problem is here.

I was in Palo Alto when ?KEY passed.  At first, KEY? was favored, returning
only a flag; but a couple of technicians cited timing issues, and aspects
involving typeahead buffers.  (Greg, I'd be interested in a review of these
details.)

But they opined that returning the character along with the true flag solved
the problem(s).  While I've a preference against operators returning a
variable number of operands, from my viewpoint either operator seems good.


Robert Berkey

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