Getchar w/wout echo

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <1988Aug23.164855.26679 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <302 at quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>>    ... if you want to control features like echoing you
>>    should probably be using Curses...
>
>Urk.  No!  Control of echoing and such is fairly nicely done in Curses,
>but there is too much other baggage involved.  What you should be using, as
>soon as it becomes available, is the POSIX set of terminal-control functions
>(unless it's changed again, POSIX terminal control is now done by a bunch of
>little functions rather than by an ioctl-style one-big-struct interface).

Please explain what is wrong with my suggestion.
Who _cares_ how much baggage comes with Curses?
(a) I don't have to write it.
(b) I don't have to use the other stuff.
(c) On a paging system, I don't even have to page the other stuff in.
The basic point is that implementations of Curses exist *NOW* for
	BSD UNIX
	System V
	VMS
	MS-DOS
I don't see POSIX having much impact on MS-DOS, and surmise that VMS may
not conform to POSIX for a few years yet.  Using Curses (loathesome though
I find it) is more portable than using POSIX features that generally aren't
available yet.  (We have about half-a-dozen varieties of UNIX here, and
none of them has POSIX terminal control.)

I also meant to suggest, but did not say plainly enough, that somone who
wants control over echoing is likely to want other forms of control over
the terminal (if not now, then in the next revision of the program) which
are provided in Curses but aren't attainable by means of a few #ifdefs in
a page of code as echo control is.