On Sat, Oct 29, 2016 at 1:54 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> wrote: > https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QBasic/Advanced_Input > indicates that INKEY$ doesn't even test the keyboard for presses, but is > only retrieving the next item from the keyboard input /buffer/ (which that > article goes on to mention used to be part of a dedicated hardware chip, > but now is a software/interrupt maintained buffer).
True, but in practice, it's the same thing. The keyboard buffer ring gets populated by the interrupt handler, and INKEY$ looks at the buffer, sees if it's empty (return ""), and if not, consumes and returns one key. > And it defines the extended return value as the "scan code" for the > keyboard. Which would just be a number assigned to the key position, and > might (back in those days) have had different values going from machine to > machine. Most of the modifier keys (shift, control) in those days did not > produce their own codes. Yes, but who ever writes programs that run on multiple different computers? Just hard-code those scan codes everywhere, it'll be fine! ChrisA born in those lackadaisical days when "Extended ASCII" was a single thing, because the rest of the world didn't exist -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
