parallel port access?

[Jochen Küpper]

>>>>> Peter Hansen wrote on Thu, 07 Dec 2000 11:56:56 -0500:

Peter> Jochen Küpper wrote:

>> So I would say you'll need a generic wrapper function for sending data
>> to the OS, that's it. On Unix I'd say all the problem reduces to find
>> out wether there is a printer-file and what it is called.

Peter> I'm guessing that many of the people interested in this kind of thing
Peter> (direct control of parallel port) want to use it to directly twiddle the
Peter> bits, in order to gain quick-n-dirty control of some external
Peter> equipment.
[...]

Oh, sure. But in that situation (q-a-d, hack, ...) there needn't be a
generic nor clean solution, IMHO:) And "hacking" a parallel port isn't
really that hard, I'd say it's more than easy compared to some unusual
equipment you're going to access.
Moreover such stuff usually doesn't need to be widely portable...

I'd actually suggest the original poster to write a driver for that (a
kernel module on Linux, e.g.). This should provide a abstraction-layer
at the highest possible layer and as such simplify the application!

To my mind low-level hardware-support shouldn't go into a "language"!
Abstraction from the different philosophies of generic parport access
would make sense, though.

Greetings,
Jochen
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