Timeout on read()?

[Greg Ewing]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> 
> I don't think specific GUI windows will be mapped to descriptors
> directly usable in select on any soon-coming Unix dialect:-).

Actually, Sun's original GUI (SunView) *did* have a
file descriptor for each window. There were a bunch of
winXXX entries in /dev, and each time you opened a window,
one of them got allocated (rather like /dev/ptys).

I think they were only used for output, though, not
input, although I'm not sure -- the details of all that
stuff were hidden inside the library.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury,	  
Christchurch, New Zealand
To get my email address, please visit my web page:	  
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg