Re: Standards question wrt winnstr & friends

[Thomas Dickey]

On Tue, 2 May 2006, Mike Aubury wrote:

> Just trying to get the ncurses libform compiled with pdcurses - noticed a
> slight difference..
>
>
> Looking at the return values for the pdcurses winnstr family of functions:
>
>        All functions return OK on success and ERR on error.
>
> Whereas the ncurses functions :
>
>
>       All of the functions return ERR upon failure, or the number of
> characters actually read into the string.

I see (actually it appears that the manpage does not say this, but the 
code does).

> As the libform files "frm_driver.c" function Windows_To_Buffer makes use of
> this count - its causing me troubles (as pdcurses is returning 0!)

Is that PDCurses 2.6 or 2.7?
The latter changes ERR from a 0 to -1
(a quick check of the versions shows a 2.8 for current version).

> For now - I'm working around it in my version of the libform code - but which
> is the "right" return value ?

offhand I would say they should return zero - will look/see what the 
history of that was: if it was never documented/never used, I can
make it conform to the spec.  Otherwise it's a wart.

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net