printf, data presentation

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <19 at xenlink.UUCP> tony at xenlink.UUCP (Tony Field) writes:

>I wonder why C i/o functions - including curses - do not provide a simple
>method of accepting 'fixed format' screen input?  The following example
>illustrates the problem and also shows a simple solution.
[....]
>If any one is interested in this general problem, I would appreciate
>their comments.  In addition, I could provide a bunch of C code (that
>currently runs under Xenix or QNX) that implements all of the above.

I would like to see something like this but extended so that if the
terminal is actually a PC running a special terminal emulation program
the editing would be handled locally.  The host would just pass the input
form and field parameters and tell the terminal whether it wanted the
the response back by charcter, field or full screen.  I would want to
do this over a network with a unix host, PC's as terminals, with the
users unaware that the application was not running under DOS, but is seems
like something that would be generally useful regardless of the physical
link.  Given the popularity of PC's as terminals, I'm surprised this hasn't
been done (or has it?).

Les Mikesell