Guardian Programmer's Guide

Table Of Contents
Communicating With Terminals
Guardian Programmer’s Guide 421922-014
10 - 13
Setting the Interrupt Characters for Conversational
Mode
Using the Backspace Character
The backspace character permits the user to back up and then reenter one or more
mistyped characters. The specific action involved depends on the type of terminal.
Typically, on video terminals the cursor is backspaced one position for each backspace
received. On hard-copy devices that can backspace, a line feed and a backspace are
issued for the first backspace received, and a single backspace is issued for each
subsequent backspace received. On hard-copy devices that do not backspace, a
backslash (\) is printed for each backspace entered.
Backspacing is invisible to the application program, because the read operation is not
yet complete. In other words, the data eventually returned to the application has
already been edited to reflect the changes intended by the backspacing. The terminal
I/O process handles the backspacing.
Using the Line-Cancel Character
The line-cancel character permits the user to cancel the current line and reenter it.
When the file system receives the line-cancel character, the system writes an “@”
character, followed by a carriage return and a line feed (CRLF) to the terminal.
Line cancel is invisible to the application program. When the read from the terminal
eventually finishes, everything entered before the line-cancel character has already
been discarded and the only data returned to the application are the characters that
were typed after the line-cancel character was entered.
Figure 10-2. Conversational-Mode Interrupt Characters—Default Values
VST118.VSD