sommar@enea.UUCP (Erland Sommarskog) (09/05/87)
In a recent article sns@genghis.UUCP (Sam Southard) writes: >In article <1069@bsu-cs.UUCP>, dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes: >> But perhaps the most outstanding advantage of VMS C environment is that >> the cursor control routines require a terminal manufactured by DEC or >> something equivalent. This saves no end of trouble--no more time >> wasted having to create termcap entries for strange terminals of >> questionable quality. > >If you want to limit yourself to DEC terminals, then go ahead - hard code >the DEC control sequences into your programs. Don't limit us to only those >terminals. /etc/termcap (or terminfo) is a feature, not a disadvantage. I think that Sam Southard missed the ironic tone in Rahul Dhesi's article. Anyway, a little correction here. As far I know VAX-C curses is built on SMG, the modern correspondence to curses on VMS. SMG has support for non-DEC terminals. You can write your own TERMTABLE.TXT describing the terminal you have. I guess this is just like termcap and as far as I can read from my VMS manual, VMS takes much more terminal capabilities in regard than termcap does. For those who are interested, I refer to chapter 3.10 in VMS Run-Time Library Reference Manual. It should be added that there is a performance penalty using this table. VT100/200 terminals are supported more "directly". If you want to argue with me personally on this point, please do this by mail. I wouldn't even dream of reading comp.lang.c. (The quoted articles did for some reason appear in the Ada group too. That's how my eyes met them.) -- Erland Sommarskog ENEA Data, Stockholm sommar@enea.UUCP