Parity is used to determine bit errors on characters, it is
	conventinally an extra bit sent at the end of the character.

		Even parity means the parity bit will be set if an even
		number of bits are set to '1'.

		Odd parity is the opposite.

		Mark paity means the bit is always set.

		Space parity menas the bit is never set (this is the same
		as stripping 8bit data to 7bit).

	If you cannot manage no parity, go with space.

	Parity will detect if a single bit is in error, or any other
	odd number of bits, but cannot detect if an even number of
	bits is incorrect.

                David/abs abs@anim.dreamworks.com

    		       - Oakwood apartments -
     - $1300 a month and people steal your laundry - What a place -

On Sat, 3 May 1997, Johan Carlsson wrote:

> Right now I'm using a terminal emulator on a Mac as console. I just set it
> to 8n1, which IIRC is the only setting I ever used. It seems getty can
> figure this out by itself since I fed it std.9600 which uses the vanilla
> ap (any parity) setting in gettytab. The reason I'm asking (in addition to
> just being curious) is that I found this weird terminal (Westward 1015)
> which is supposed to be a combined VT100/Tektronix terminal. It has a
> setup menu where you can choose the parity: mark, space, even or odd. I
> never heard of mark and space before so I went for even. I then tried to
> make an entry for it in gettytab with ep (even parity) but it doesn't
> work, I'll check the pin layout tomorrow. So I guess my question is: (in
> general) could someone explain parity to me, like what's it for, and (more
> specifically) how smart is getty, I thought it only checked the baud rate,
> does it really figure out the parity if you feed it with ap?