making characters disappear

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1991Feb23.170142.538 at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald at aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) writes:
>That is because it SHOULD be possible to do such very common things
>as non-echo reading or reading single characters without terminating
>carriage returns. We should be discussing how to put this into the
>next standardized version of the language. It SHOULD have been in the
>present version. 

I don't think you would find many (if any) people among those who have
carefully considered what needed to go into the C standard, who would
agree with you.  This is clearly a very system-specific notion; there
are C environments where the notion makes no sense.  The C standard
addresses (for hosted environments only) just the minimum universally-
implementable support necessary for useful applications across all
hosted environments.  There are other standards, such as POSIX.1, that
address more system-specific features, and that is an appropriate way
to deal with them.