I read this article and try to do the exercise in D Programming Language, but encounter a problem in the first exercise.
(1) Display series of numbers
(1,2,3,4, 5....etc) in an infinite
loop. The program should quit if
someone hits a specific key (Say
ESCAPE key).
Of course the infinite loop is not a big problem, but the rest is. How could I grab a key hit in D/Tango? In tango FAQ it says use C function kbhit() or get(), but as I know, these are not in C standard library, and does not exist in glibc which come with my Linux machine which I use to programming.
I know I can use some 3rd party library like ncurses, but it has same problem just like kbhit() or get(), it is not standard library in C or D and not pre-installed on Windows. What I hope is that I could done this exercise use just D/Tango and could run it on both Linux and Windows machine.
How could I do it?
Here's how you do it in the D programming language:
import std.c.stdio;
import std.c.linux.termios;
termios ostate; /* saved tty state */
termios nstate; /* values for editor mode */
// Open stdin in raw mode
/* Adjust output channel */
tcgetattr(1, &ostate); /* save old state */
tcgetattr(1, &nstate); /* get base of new state */
cfmakeraw(&nstate);
tcsetattr(1, TCSADRAIN, &nstate); /* set mode */
// Read characters in raw mode
c = fgetc(stdin);
// Close
tcsetattr(1, TCSADRAIN, &ostate); // return to original mode
kbhit is indeed not part of any standard C interfaces, but can be found in conio.h.
However, you should be able to use getc/getchar from tango.stdc.stdio - I changed the FAQ you mention to reflect this.
D generally has all the C stdlib available (Tango or Phobos) so answers to this question for GNU C should work in D as well.
If tango doesn't have the needed function, generating the bindings is easy. (Take a look at CPP to cut through any macro junk.)
Thanks for both of your replies.
Unfortunately, my main development environment is Linux + GDC + Tango, so I don't have conio.h, since I don't use DMC as my C compiler.
And I also found both getc() and getchar() is also line buffered in my development environment, so it could not achieve what I wish I could do.
In the end, I've done this exercise by using GNU ncurses library. Since D could interface C library directly, so it does not take much effort. I just declare the function prototype that I used in my program, call these function and linking my program against ncurses library directly.
It works perfectly on my Linux machine, but I still not figure out how could I do this without any 3rd party library and could run on both Linux and Windows yet.
import tango.io.Stdout;
import tango.core.Thread;
// Prototype for used ncurses library function.
extern(C)
{
void * initscr();
int cbreak ();
int getch();
int endwin();
int noecho();
}
// A keyboard handler to quit the program when user hit ESC key.
void keyboardHandler ()
{
initscr();
cbreak();
noecho();
while (getch() != 27) {
}
endwin();
}
// Main Program
void main ()
{
Thread handler = new Thread (&keyboardHandler);
handler.start();
for (int i = 0; ; i++) {
Stdout.format ("{}\r\n", i).flush;
// If keyboardHandler is not ruuning, it means user hits
// ESC key, so we break the infinite loop.
if (handler.isRunning == false) {
break;
}
}
return 0;
}
As Lars pointed out, you can use _kbhit and _getch defined in conio.h and implemented in (I believe) msvcrt for Windows. Here's an article with C++ code for using _kbhit and _getch.