printf, data presentation

[Jonathan Leech]

In article <411 at ispi.UUCP> jbayer at ispi.UUCP (Jonathan Bayer) writes:
>In article <310 at twwells.uucp> bill at twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
>>And many terminals are incapable of transmitting characters as they
>>are typed.
>I don't know about what terminals you are using, but most (if not all)
>serial terminals ARE capable of transmitting characters as they are
>typed.

    IBM 3270-style block mode terminals have this "feature".  I've
used Unix (Amdahl UTS/580) on such terminals, and it's painful. The
usual editors don't work, ksh loses, etc (but hey! you get hardware
pagination). There are a *lot* of block mode terminals in the world.
Fortunately, most of them aren't connected to Unix systems.

    Some of the same problems can arise when working over packet
networks (X.25) that don't support break after every character.
You wouldn't want them to in any case, since charging is frequently on
a per packet basis :-)

    Followups to comp.terminals.
--
    Jon Leech (leech at cs.unc.edu)    __@/
    ``My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe,
      why it is as it is and why it exists at all.''
	- Stephen Hawking