Date   : Tue, 12 Apr 1988 16:06:10 GMT
From   : MA18%SYSE.SALFORD.AC.UK@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
Subject: BUG in VLU and TCVIEW12

(Minor) BUG with VLU.COM and TCVIEW12.COM
Both these useful programs fail to deal correctly with a TCAP with an
escaped characater in one of the control strings. In my case I need to send
a null as part of the standout string. This is taken as the string terminator,
and the real terminating null ends the 'reverse video off' string immediately.
This results in a VLU with the entire screen in reverse video. The back-slash
character which prefixes the null is sent to the screen, but fortunately it
does no damage! I have not worked out a patch yet for either program, but
I have adopted a work-around for my own system, which masks the 'null' byte
before using it, so I can simply use a character with enough zero bits at the
bottom, but which is not all zero. I hope this is a help to anyone who has a
similar problem. When I get time I will try out as many programs as possible,
as I suspect that this bug could be quite widespread. When I first got my
Z-system I set up a TCAP with reverse-video, but dropped it as some programs
produced such awful screens. This may have been the problem.

-- Tony Addyman