ReadKey like Function in C

[Henry Spencer]

In article <3727 at buengc.BU.EDU> bph at buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
>>awarded a "VE" stock response code, meaning:  The Standard must
>>accommodate a variety of environments.
>
>I don't get it.
>
>All it's gotta say is something to the effect that there should
>be a function, call it "readkey()", that returns the value of
>the next char from stdin as soon after it's typed as it's needed.

And how does that magically translate into standards compliance from
compiler vendors?

The result of such a requirement will be that the people who have trouble
implementing it will ignore it.  Thus defeating one major purpose of
standardization, which is to give the users a guarantee of what they
can portably expect.

>The Compiler writers are in a much better position to implement
>it than are a bunch of fractious C programmers arguing over
>whether to use fstat() or ioctl() and the length of timeout()...

If you think these are the sorts of issues that come up in implementing
such a requirement, you have overlooked the fact that Unix is not the
whole world, and these days the majority of C implementations are not
for Unix.  It's much worse in the real world.
-- 
V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu