Re: Ncurses & native WIN32 support...

[William McBrine]

On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Austin Gilbert wrote:

> I can tell you that PDCurses doesn't compile on my Mac OS 10.4.3 machine 
> out of the box :( This makes me somewhat concerned about its 
> portability.

No, no, that's not what it's for. It doesn't *have* to be portable (though 
it is -- just not as portable as ncurses). You don't write for PDCurses or 
ncurses; you write for the standard curses API, and link against ncurses, 
system curses, or PDCurses, as appropriate, depending on your target 
platform. If you use advanced features that are ncurses- or PDCurses- 
specific, you ifdef them. But most programs won't need that.

Even if you did get PDCurses working on your Mac, that would be of limited 
usefulness, since the "X11" port of PDCurses (the only one that could work 
on the Mac) is just that -- it runs directly on X, rather than in a 
terminal, as you might expect. Incidentally, there are completely 
different implementations of curses for Mac OS 9 and other systems. The 
general idea is that curses is a portable API, while the implementation is 
system-specific. PDCurses and ncurses are implementations that are 
themselves somewhat cross-platform; but the key to portability is the API.

The way I look at is, use ncurses where support for different terminal 
types is desired -- mainly Unix -- and PDCurses for systems with no 
terminfo/termcap capabilities -- mainly DOS, Windows and OS/2.

--
William McBrine <address@hidden>