Echoing chars and input functions

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <64974 at sun.uucp> swilson at sun.UUCP (Scott Wilson) writes:
-I think it is unfair to characterize OS's that don't echo as being
-"deficient".  LSC, in an attempt to provide to provide compatibility,
-takes on the responsibility of creating a terminal-like window so stdio
-functions will work as expected.

If they really expect you to type "blind" in their emulated terminal
window, I would surely call that deficient!

In a scenario like this, part of the "OS" is being provided by
the C run-time environment implementation.

-I don't think it is reasonable to say
-that the C environment need not be concerned about things such as echoing
-because it is an OS problem when the host OS has no concept of a terminal.

That's not what I said.  I said it is not a problem to be addressed
by the application code.  LSC definitely should provide reasonable
support for terminal-like input, including echoing and input line
editing, in SOME part of their environment.  It should not require
special action by the typical application to get this.

-All that I really want is some portable way to read interactive input
-that looks roughly the same across implmentations of C.  As long as
-most implementations echo input fetched with getchar() and LSC doesn't
-(and the OS can't) then this isn't possible.  My complaint is that ANSI
-doesn't do anything to solve the problem.

"ANSI" is in no position to solve a design problem in the implementation
of a particular product.  You should nag the vendor to do a better job.