pavel (10/24/82)
From floyd!trb Sun Oct 24 09:25:35 1982 To: cbosgd!mark cornell!pavel harpo!ihps3!ihuxx!ignatz Subject: curses At the last usenix, cornell!pavel (or someone at cornell) claimed that they were going to write a public domain curses that was compatible with Mark's. What's up? Andy What an interesting coincidence. It was only yesterday that I finished the documentation for the first test release of my package. I am now seeking test sites and would be glad to send you a copy, Andy. The following caveats are in order, however, wrt to this preliminary release: 1) The package has not yet been tuned or profiled. As a result, it runs about 50-75% slower than the old package. It also does not yet have any register variables, a marvelous source of speed. 2) The backbone of the redisplay algorithm is in fine shape, but the lowest-level routines still do some dumb things. Also, I have not yet hacked it to make use of all of the really obscure features available (such as scrolling a dumb terminal to achieve a limited delete-line capability). The update module is due to be redone (to take advantage of hard-won wisdom) before the final release. 3) Three of the features documented in the paper Mark gave at USENIX are not yet supported, pending the rewrite of the update module. They are: a. The 'Typeahead Check' which aborts a refresh() if a character is typed at the keyboard. This is to allow programs the option of not producing a lot of useless output (have you ever hit ^F^F^F^F in vi and then waited for a while for it to catch up? b. The MINICURSES subset feature, allowing the user to only bring in a very small portion of the package if they have no need of the multi-windowing and fancy keyboard input facilities. c. Support for terminals with the so-called 'magic-cookie' glitch, wherein changes of video attributes leave one or more blank-like special characters on the screen. All of these features are fairly easy to provide and will appear in the final release. Compatibility with Mark's package is, obviously, fairly difficult to guarantee, considering that he and I have an ocean of lawyers betwixt us. However, the paper given out at the conference really contained a great amount of information, yielding a pretty coherent picture of what kinds of extensions had been made. At the very least, my package jibes with the info in that paper and with the old package. The final release of the public-domain package will be timed to coincide with the final 'freeze' on code to appear in the 4.2BSD release, at which time I will make a grand and wonderful announcement on USENET and Unix-Wizards. Before that, though, I would be happy to send tapes to anyone who is willing to run it. I really can't afford to just send out tapes, being a lowly grad-student, but if folks are willing to send me tapes of their own, I will tar it off and send it back. Please send tapes to Pavel Curtis Computer Science Dept. 405 Upson Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Ph- (607) 256-4934 If you do send me a tape, please also send me net-mail to warn me about it. I do so hate surprises. Pavel