A keyboard in which the function or code to be generated by each key can be allocated and changed by program control. Terminals for applications such as industrial data collection or point-of-sale applications frequently have keyboards in which some keys—usually the numeric and certain essential functions—are hardwired and the others are soft keys. The soft keys may have a meaning that is allocated to them at the time of initial installation and remains unchanged, or they may have their meaning changed during the course of a single transaction.