Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:

> it appears that most
> solutions I thought of will interfere in some way with the system
> event loop.  I didn't see anything short of a VM revbuild that could
> provide this relatively straightforward functionality.

How 'bout just a primitive you'd use to poll the keyboard to get its current
(machine-dependent) state, much like the primitive for reading the state of
mouse buttons and modifier keys?

Then you'd have methods within Squeak (or in the VM of course) for
translating the raw state data to a platform-independent format.

Henrik