On Tuesday, September 11 at 04:56 PM, quoth Mutt:
<BackSpace> must be defined by behavior, not by the ink printed on the key, because of course no program can know what's printed on the key.No, that's not how the terminfo works. <BackSpace> means the backspace key. No more. Just like <Left> means the left key and so on.
How is the terminfo supposed to know what the user has painted on their keyboard? It can't know whether the backspace key emits a ^H or a ^? (or any other value), so why pretend that it's an authoritative resource on the question of what the backspace key emits? I recognize that it would be awfully nice if we could somehow always know what key sequence the backspace key emits, but we simply can't.
After all, what is it about the backspace key that makes it the backspace key? There's its position on the keyboard, and the fact that it says "backspace" on it, and what we expect the computer to do when we press it. Its position on the keyboard can change, and what is written on it can change as well (Apple keyboards don't have Backspace and Delete keys, they have Delete and Del keys; older Sun keyboards don't have Backspace keys either, they have keys with a left-arrow on them (these keys are the same size as the <Left> key, have the same picture on them, but are just in the top-right corner of the qwerty area of the keyboard)). What it all really boils down to as far as what we mean when we say "the backspace key" is "that key that we press that we think will delete the character to the left of the cursor" and no more. But truly, since we can change which key performs that operation, why are we still working with an obviously broken definition of "the backspace key" as "that key in the upper-right corner of the qwerty section of the keyboard that has either Backspace, Delete, a left-arrow, or something else similarly suggestive on it"?
~Kyle
--
Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
-- Walter Lippmann
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