Re: Ringing the bell?

[thompson(at)orpheus.nascom.nasa.gov (William Thompson)]

"Harvey Rarback" <rarback@slac.stanford.edu> writes:

>    Folks,

>I am writing a turnkey interactive widget application in IDL 5.3 on an
>OpenVMS platform.  I start command line IDL in a VMS batch queue using an
>IDL batch file so that the user never
>sees the IDL prompt.  The only thing that doesn't work with this scheme is
>that I haven't figured out a way to ring the bell when the user does
>something wrong.  One workaround is to start an iconized terminal from the
>batch queue and send IDL's output there.  Then

>print, string(7b), format = '(a,$)'

>will ring the bell, but this introduces an extra terminal window and seems
>awfully tacky.

>Sometime back, IDL seems to have acquired the undocumented built-in 'beep'
>which also doesn't work if there is no terminal to send the output to.

>I did a little experiment on IDL 5.4 running on a Tru64 Unix platform.  Here
>the command line IDL rings the bell with the print statement, but seems to
>ring the bell for the beep command only when I *exit* IDL.  For idlde, the
>beep command works, but the print statement just outputs a funky degree-like
>symbol.

>Can anyone shed some light on the mysterious 'beep' procedure and help me
>out in ringing the bell?

This must be a bug in IDL 5.4, because all previous versions of IDL on my Tru64
Unix platform ring the bell when you enter the 'beep' command.  I get the same
behavior as you, though, with IDL 5.4.

Bill Thompson