At 2024-02-05T23:57:08+0000, Lennart Jablonka wrote: > Quoth G. Branden Robinson: > > Fortunately, ncurses is attentively maintained. So instead of > > sucking up a whole bunch of oxygen there as I did with groff, I > > found that it behooves me to actually read the X/Open Issue 7 > > standard for curses. > > > > That is a 420-page document, so it's taking some time to absorb. > > Since you wrote this, every now and then I’ve looked at the > ncurses-bug archives, scrolling through some of your patches. That’s > a little fun.
I said something the other day about eating elephants. The ncurses documentation is a _mastodon_. > If you haven’t finished rewriting the ncurses manual yet, I haven't. That's a long way off. However my work there has been on pause for a couple of weeks. > are you perchance done absorbing X/Open Curses? No, but... > You know, just in case you want to take another look at that patch I > sent a while ago. For grotty. To use terminfo. I do, and I think I'm adequately prepared to do so. When perusing the ncurses documentation I focused first on the low level stuff. Forms, menus, and panels will come much later (after *curses proper), and I don't remotely need any of that to understand how grotty needs to talk to terminfo. So I will take another look, yes. But tparm(const char *str, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long) is one of the worst things I've ever seen in C code. As I just got done saying (more or less) to Deri, when you have to obfuscate your inputs to cram them into the data structure you're using, that's a sign that you're using the wrong data structure. And early C programmers sure did have a terror of passing structs on the stack. (They were _so_ scared of structs that as soon as they declared one, they concealed it with a typedef, which isn't a type definition but a type _alias_, and some day I will yell this at Dennis Ritchie's grave.) I don't know if this is because compiler support was bad or because that's just how coders rolled in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Who needs a data structure when you can use a dozen global primitives? For all the stick C coders of that generation gave to poor bastards whose first programming was language was Microsoft BASIC (and who consequently, it was held, were forever crippled in programming ability), C sure did seem to carry quite a population of advocates whose main appreciation of C's advantages over MS BASIC seemed to be that the former didn't need line numbers. :-| goto fail; Regards, Branden
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