*BSD News Article 30798


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From: mfoley@infinet.com (Mark Foley)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Subject: Re: [?] Problems compiling curses program!!
Date: 22 May 1994 06:53:38 GMT
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Marko Lamminen (hawk@news.clinet.fi) wrote:
: JOSE@olis.lib.ox.ac.uk wrote:
: : The defines A_REVERSE, A_BOLD etc. are NOT in curses.h, or at least they
: : aren't in the curses.h that comes with FreeBSD 1.1 Gamma.
: : 

: 	They are part of SysVish curses so don't really exists
: 	in FreeBSD. Converting a SysV curses program to work
: 	with BSD curses can be a hell of a job, since SysV has
: 	quite a few functions that BSD hasn't got.

: 	Gladly, no self-respecting coder uses curses. :)


Oooh, cheap shot! Actually, I like curses and use it alot. As a terminal 
vendor independent screen utility it can't be beat. I know, X and DOS-WINDOW
are the wave of the future, but I spent a career searching for the Holy Grail
of platform portability and curses helps me in my quest.

Granted - BSD curses is stunted. The company I work for has developed a
curses port for DOS, Unix (incl BSD), VMS and OS/2 (all the same source
code - not different versions per). If there is any interest out there, I
think I could persuade people to contribute a freeware version to humanity.

One caution - this "curses" was originally ported from SYSV 2.0 back in '88.
I know the SYSV version has evolved since then (including some change of
functionality), and our curses has also evolved. For example, both versions
deal with line drawing characters, but both do it differently. We have
relative sub-window addressing, etc. The point is, your SYSV 2.0 programs
may compile and run just fine, but recent programs would need some work.
Keep this in mind before clammoring for the software!

e-mail some responses to me. Also, anyone know of a curses newsgroup?