🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm having a (rather severe) problem with dBase III on the 3b1, and
I would greatly appreciate any help/hints/suggestions (other than
scrapping dBase III, which we intend to do in the future anyhow).

We have a large application which was originally written in dBase II.
Thru the use of a lex script I wrote, and a little hand editting, I
managed to get it running under dBase III.  HOWEVER, one of the tricks
it depends on is being able to send data straight to a printer attached
to the terminal.  This doesn't sound too bad -- just send the correct
escape sequence to the terminal, right?  Wrong.  Whenever I try to
send an ESC to the terminal, all I get is `?', as follows:

.
. ? chr(27)
?
.

Using chr() with printable characters works just fine.  Also, sending
the escape sequences from a C program works, so I assume I have the
terminal and printer connected correctly.  I've also tried

. store chr(27) to esc_char

and then printing esc_char, but I get the same results.  Can anyone help?
We need to get this application running as soon as possible.  I'm going
to re-write it in C using Informix (tm) as the DBM, but that will take
a little while.

If anyone is interested in `watch-fors' for dBase III on the 3b1, drop
me a note.  I've got a million of 'em...

TIA
-- 
Rich Kuhns		{ihnp4, decvax, etc...}!pur-ee!pur-phy!mrstve!rjk