Aucbvax.5890
fa.info-vax
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax
Thu Jan 21 08:22:06 1982
Re: UNIX vs. VMS
>From Samuelson@SANDIA Thu Jan 21 08:19:31 1982
While I agree with you that systems should allow programs to take characters
from the terminal with no funny side effects at times, it is certainly not
true that they should ALWAYS do that.  I think an intelligent terminal
handler should be part of an operating system.  The "pause at end of page"
handling done by TOPS-20 is a good example of something the operating
system SHOULD do FOR the user.  It can be turned off, so if you are not
interested it will not do it TO you.  That is a very important distinction.
I have never seen any text editor which did not have some special characters
which distinguish text from commands, and escape is a very reasonable character
to make that distinction.  The problem is to include some convenient way
to allow special characters to be treated as text.  EMACS does that in a
remarkably simple way, using control-q to mean "quote the next charcter"
or "treat the next character as text, no matter what it normally does".

On output it is perfectly reasonable for the system to do special things
with such characters as form-feed.  The problem is to make the system smart
enough that it will do what is right for your terminal.  Some terminals
clear the screen on a form-feed, for example.  You may NOT want the form-feed
sent immediately after the text on such a terminal, but rather held till
you can read the text, or possibly turned into some number of line feeds.
The choice should be up to the user, the system should not force any
particular arbitrary choice, including doing nothing.

What I am saying is that neither UNIX nor VMS is doing it right!  The
action that the operating system takes with special characters sent
to the terminal should be kept flexible, with the user allowed to specify
easily what is to be done with special characters on both input and output!

- Sam -
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