Tty interface standards: Provide a way to turn off '\'

[John Gilmore]

I have heard that various people are trying to come up with a standard
that would have the features of V7, 4.1, 4.2, SysV, etc. so that
newer Unix systems could all provide the same interface.

I'd like to request that one bug in the interfaces be fixed.  There is
no way to turn off the special interpretation of the '\' character.
You have to turn off all special character handling to get rid of it.
And you can't change the character to something else.  I think it's really
bad that all of the Unix tty drivers continue to "steal" this (printing!)
character.

I would've expected that literal-next (^V, 4.2 t_lnextc) would let us
obsolete the feature, e.g. if you want to quote with \, set t_lnextc to
'\'.  There is some interaction with the LCASE bit that would need to
be defined though.