[Info-vax] Keypad state in various VMS utilities

[David Jones]

On Saturday, October 3, 2020 at 2:08:59 PM UTC-4, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> I suspect that is an artifact of the use of SMG within AUTHORIZE and 
> other tools. 
> This SMG usage likely for command-line recall within the prompting. 
> SMG being old and crufty, but still eminently preferable to using $qio 
> calls for any of this. 
> 

I use SMG all the time solely for its virtual keyboard recall buffer feature. I never
see the keypad being put in application mode unless I create a key table and
include it as an argument in the read call. I rarely find it worth the trouble to define
application keypad keys in command line interfaces (as opposed to screen oriented
interfaces). Apparently the coder, back in 1987, thought that it would be 'cleaner'
to supply a keytable to SMG$READ_COMPOSED_LINE() than specify a null
pointer.