Re: lynx-dev Re: ^Ve considered harmful

[Bela Lubkin]

Bela>> Lynx also works with various OS's native curses, some of which do *not* 
Bela>> handle this correctly.  So if you use ESC for a quote char, be prepared 
Bela>> for endless niggling bugs on older systems, slowly dwindling as the 
Bela>> years go by... 

Tom Dickey replied:

Tom> hmm (can you give more background - such as SVr3 curses does this, or SVr2?
Tom> I've only worked with SVr4, SVr3 and several flavors of BSD - but probably
Tom> haven't studied the older ones recently enough to see this problem).

I know, from my years in SCO Support, that customers always had trouble
writing curses programs that could interpret ESC as a separate command.
It would always delay a whole second before accepting a standalone ESC.
That may have changed in newer releases, and there may always have been
a workaround (I forget -- seems like there was, but it was something
complex and prone to failure).  But certainly, by default and on some
versions of the library, ESC was a bad choice of command character.

>Bela<