Why are “TranslateMessage” and “DispatchMessage” separate calls?

Question

Most of the Win32 main loops I\'ve seen are all structured like:

while (GetMessage(&message, NULL, 0, 0) > 0) {
  TranslateMessage(&message);
  Di         


        

Answer 1

TranslateMessage() converts virtual keys messages to character input messages.

It is a separate call for the remote chance that under certain circumstances you would want to not produce character input messages for certain virtual keys.