ldo@peace.waikato.ac.nz (Lawrence D'Oliveiro) (01/19/90)
In the referenced message, wrp@krebs.acc.Virginia.EDU (Bill Pearson) is trying to port a Unix program to an MPW tool. The program is displaying a prompt (without trailing newline), and the user types in a response and presses Enter. The trouble is that the input line as read by the program contains the prompt as well as the response! Remember that MPW represents a unique, and somewhat quirky, merging of the Unix concept of input and output byte streams with a windowing system. The basic convention is that, to feed input to a tool (or a command sequence to the Shell), you select the appropriate section of input, and press Enter. To this is added a useful shortcut, namely, if you don't have a selection, just a blinking insertion point, then the entire line containing the insertion point as taken as the input. This looks superficially like ordinary keyboard/screen input/output on conventional character-oriented systems. Unfortunately, as you have discovered, it is not. Once some text appears in a window, the system forgets where it came from--whether it was output from a command, or whether you typed it. It's all just part of the (possibly unsaved) contents of the text file which is being displayed and edited in that window. In conclusion, the only way to get around this problem is to select the part of the line that you typed (carefully omitting the prompt at the start of the line) before pressing Enter. The moral is, conventional character-oriented dialogs do not work well in the MPW environment. The Mac offers its native alternatives; though perhaps you might not be prepared to spend the time it takes to use them. Lawrence D'Oliveiro Computer Services Dept University of Waikato Hamilton New Zealand