On Thu, 30 Dec 1999, Dave Huang wrote:

> On Thu, 30 Dec 1999, Sean Matheis wrote:
> > Per the man page for printcap,
> > 
> > sh      bool    false             suppress printing of burst page header
> > 
> > To me, the non-Unix programmer, this implies that "sh=true" means 
> > suppress the printing.
> 
> Setting "sh" to true does mean suppress the printing. However, including
> "sh=true" in the string doesn't set "sh" to true. The manpage doesn't
> explain it very clearly, but for boolean values, just including the name
> in the string sets it to true. I guess "sh=true" just gets ignored,
> leaving "sh" at the default value of false.

To be precise, it sets the string class variable "sh" to "true"; the
bool class "sh" is untouched and therefore still set to the default,
i.e. false. You can have up to three distinct variables with any
particular name, as each class has it's own namespace.