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A-Shell Development History

1691.0: New INFLD type code ||1 modifies the timeout feature causing it to start out suspended. The first character typed reactivates the timer. Note that all other timer-related options and type codes remain in effect, and that the initial timer suspension, as with the normal manual timeout suspension, is for 10 minutes.

1691.1: INFLD type code ||1 now processes the timer on each character received, as well as after one second of no characters, allowing it to time out even in the middle of steady—faster than one character per second—typing.

Normally, the timer logic is only processed at the end of each second without input. That makes sense from standpoint of minimizing CPU overhead in idle fields, as well as user-friendliness—since timing out while the user is actively typing isn't very friendly. But ||1 is a special case, intended to accept only burst-style input, such as might be received from a scanner.

Note that it is left to the application to weed out partial inputs deemed invalid after the timeout. Exitcode will be set to 11 to indicate timeout. And also note that you probably want to disable most of the timer-related messaging (see type codes / and +), but not Q, since ||1 starts by suspending the timeout until the first character received.