Unix Technical Digest V2 #3

[Heiby]

Unix Technical Digest       Wed, 15 May 85       Volume  2 : Issue   3

Today's Topics:
                                cfree
                   echoin, screen editors & Unix
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Date: Sun, 12 May 85 2:35:00 EDT
From: Doug Gwyn <ihnp4!seismo!gwyn at BRL.ARPA>
Subject: cfree

cfree() is going away (reference: ANSI X3J11/85-008).
There is no reason for it to differ from free().

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Date: Mon, 13 May 85 11:23:42 edt
From: pegasus!hansen
Subject: echoin, screen editors & Unix

This is all reminiscient of facilities that were added to Multics many moons
ago when Stallman's Emacs was ported there by Greenberg and company. I
believe that they had a very general purpose mechanism which stated what to
do with each character: echo it or call some function or other.

I've also made and seen several proposals through the years on doing
something similar within UNIX via ioctl's. There are only two major pieces
of information which have to be provided: how many printable characters to
echo before returning and which characters are to be considered printable. A
read would then return when that many characters had been typed or a
non-printable character was typed. There also needs to be a default ioctl
mode to return the terminal to as soon as such a special read returns.

Adding characters at the end of the line is properly handled.  The program
could do inserting of characters by leaving the terminal in insert mode
before calling this ioctl/read pair.  And any special command could also be
handled properly.

Of course, in Emacs you really have to have full control over what
characters cause a return. Doing automatic parenthesis matching (cursor
bounces back to the matching paren for a second or two) requires control
being returnable when typing the right paren. The bit mask suggested by Tim
Maroney would be suitable for this.

	Tony Hansen
	pegasus!hansen

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End of Unix Technical Digest
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Ronald W. Heiby / netnews at wnuxb.UUCP | unix-request at cbosgd.UUCP
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