Terminal output: parity, 7 vs. 8 bits, etc.

[Boyd Roberts]

Dichotomy?  You seem to forget about Ritchie's System 3 (now
in system 5) terminal driver.  It's beautiful!

Just the thing for controling tty lines.  It has selectable
character sizes and parities.  The interface to the lower
level hardware tty devices is much cleaner as well (a
pointer to a function called with what action you want done
on the line, block, unblock, start output etc...).  And it has
line disciplines too.

Berkeley can keep that revolting (~30k) mess that the call a
terminal driver.  I can't recall one of it's "features" being
"wonderful".  I shouldn't need to set ~12 options to get my
terminal in a useable state.

Nor do I want that horrible job control stuff.  If you want
virtual terminals then use a Blit.  What ever happened to
invisibility?  Why do *so* many programs have to be modified
to understand about this layer that should have been
invisible to them.  But I suppose Berkeley again can justify
that it's ok to break everything in the name of progress.

Another feeble attempt at virtual terminals was the pty(4)
"pseudo terminal driver".  How apt.

What happened to "fcntl", why are there ~28 "ioctls"?

Compatibility, come on Mark, Berkeley don't provide it.


Boyd Roberts.		...!decvax!mulga!boyd:basser