Documentation KEYSTACK - has this feature been dropped?

[Steve Fabian]

Vince's recent quest to clear the keyboard buffer made me think of the KEYSTACK command's special handling of the exclamation mark ! to clear the stack. But on looking at the HELP, that special use of ! has disappeared from HELP with the switch from 4NT (v. 8) to TCC (v. 9), along with the /A (append) option. Have these feature been dropped? I have some old batch files I still use invoke the feature.

 

[Charles Dye]

I believe that feature became unworkable when Rex completely rewrote KEYSTACK for... was it Vista?

 

[rconn]

It was dropped about 8 years ago. Even before that, it never did anything in 4NT; it was just for 4DOS.

 

[Steve Fabian]

OK. I did not find anything about ! or /A not working in 4nt5/4nt8, nor anything in TC9 Help (neither in What's New, nor under Keystack) that about the featuress' being dropped, hence my post. IMHO dropping a feature is also news, so it ought to be reported, to avoid future inquiries such as this thread. It may have been mentioned or possibly even discussed in the forum of the day.

 

[rconn]

Since it never did anything in 4NT / TCC, it was not a "feature", hence there wasn't any point in publicizing that henceforth it not only still didn't do anything, but also wasn't there.

 

[Steve Fabian]

I meant for future when something changes similarly. The keystack issue above is too old to do anything about. BTW, my personal preference when a feature remains in existence, but operates through a radically different mechanism, is to retain the same name. The 4DOS _apmlife was changed to the 4NT _batterypercent with identical definition. I would have preferred to use the old name, even if the new is more descriptive, just to avoid changing working code...