Character echo at read time instead of interrupt time (Re: AT&T Joining OSF)

[Michael "Ford" Ditto]

In article <12016 at steinmetz.ge.com> davidsen at crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>	one of the few things I like about DOS and VMS is that the
>characters are echoed as they are read, not as they are typed. This
>prevents display of info designed to be read "no echo." Fortunately
>there seems to be no reason why this can't be done in a device driver,
>even if it's not (I would like to think it is and I haven't found it).

Yes!  Unix-style echo just plain sucks, in my opinion.  The right place
to fix it on current System V systems is to write an alternative
line discipline.  That way, a user on *any* tty device could just type
"stty line 1" and get the good line discipline, and "stty line 0" would
switch back to the bogus one.  No modification of drivers or even the
stty command would be required.

>	I expect to be told by some people that this would be bad
>because it's a feature of ugly o/s's, but I'm going to write that
>device driver one day.

Ms.Dos uses disks, too, should we avoid them as well?	No, it's Unix-style
echo that's bad because it's an ugly feature of an otherwise good o/s.

I, too, vow to write that non-bogus-echo-mode discipline, hopefully
real soon, although it might be a modified version of SysV LDISC0.
-- 
					-=] Ford [=-

	.		.		(In Real Life: Mike Ditto)
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