GEnie@willett.UUCP (ForthNet articles from GEnie) (12/22/89)
Message 104 Thu Dec 21, 1989 R.BERKEY [Robert] at 01:07 PST To: Roedy Green RG> 7.0635 ?KEY RG> Bring back good old ?TERMINAL. If the DOS is so stupid RG> that ?TERMINAL is impossible, let the implementor RG> fake it with a buffer or leave it out. Why penalize RG> all of us to be compatible with brain-damaged operating RG> systems? What I recall is that ?TERMINAL , as per the fig-FORTH model, is an operator to detect the BREAK signal (the "129th" ASCII character) on an RS232 interface. While I agree that the general good should outweigh awkwardnesses for functionally-incomplete operating systems, I'm not recognizing what the problem is here. I was in Palo Alto when ?KEY passed. At first, KEY? was favored, returning only a flag; but a couple of technicians cited timing issues, and aspects involving typeahead buffers. (Greg, I'd be interested in a review of these details.) But they opined that returning the character along with the true flag solved the problem(s). While I've a preference against operators returning a variable number of operands, from my viewpoint either operator seems good. Robert Berkey ------------ ----- This message came from GEnie via willett through a semi-automated program. Report problems to: 'uunet!willett!dwp' or 'willett!dwp@gateway.sei.cmu.edu'
ForthNet@willett.UUCP (ForthNet articles from GEnie) (01/06/90)
Category 10, Topic 28 Message 105 Fri Dec 22, 1989 R.BERKEY [Robert] at 07:47 PST To: Roedy Green > _ ( -- ) at compile time > ( -- c ) at run time. > Used to create character literals. _ A compiles the > constant 65. I've fallen in love with 'A' as another form of number literal, partly because it's a syntax familiar from English. Gene LeFave writes in GEnie Category 10, Topic 28: ----- This message came from GEnie via willett through a semi-automated program. Report problems to: 'uunet!willett!dwp' or 'willett!dwp@gateway.sei.cmu.edu'