On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Greg Troxel wrote:

> Andy Ball <andy.ball@earthlink.net> writes:
>
> >    JB> Yes. And that key is expected to delete to the *left*
> >      > of the cursor. :-)
> >
> > Not by me, but then I imagine it depends on the application.
>
> Back in Seventh Edition (late 70s), and maybe during part of Sixth
> (earlier was # I think, for printing terminals), the standard erase
> character was \0177, and everyone who used Unix expected it to delete
> left.  Specifically, in other than raw mode, people expected the
> computer to send BS SPACE BS and to remove the last recent character
> from the input buffer.
>
> I only became aware a Delete that deletes to the right much later,
> with window systems, and perhaps not until PCs started doing that.   I
> don't remember delete-to-right during the X10 days.

That's what you use ^D for :-)

Seriously though, before rather recent shells (or equivalent) line editing
didn't exist, and thus it was pretty meaningless to have a delete that
deleted to the right. (I'm talking pre-1990 atleast here.) The only
applications that did that was editors, and they used some other key (or
combination of keys) to get that effect. The delete key on the keyboard
was used to delete things just typed in, and naturally that lead the
deleting to the left. Nothing else made sense. And for me, that still
makes sense. It's just the f*cking PC keyboard (damn IBM to hell) who
decided to place another key on the keyboard, at an odd place, and label
that key DELETE that started the confusion. (We will probably never be
able to fully grasp how much the IBM PC set back evolution...)

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol