Re: wide characters in perl ncurses wrapper

[Martin von Gagern]

Hello Thomas,

Thanks for your response!

Thomas Dickey wrote:
> Some of the data structures which are necessarily visible in the header
> files are different.  Simple applications (such as this one, perhaps)
> could in principle be linked with either library.

Ah! I only now noticed that there are also two sets of header files on
my system. Now I know where the different structures come from. :-)

>> Now the Perl Curses dev states that there being two libraries was an
>> indication that ncursesw should not be used by default. Do you agree?
> 
> probably not: programs that cannot be easily configured to work with any
> particular instance of nominally compatible libraries are in need of
> some maintenance.   Looking at Curses-1.15, for example, I note that all
> of the hints directory could be done better by an autoconf-style
> configure script which checks for features.

So you're saying that using libncursesw would be better, but I can't
expect it to work out of the box but have to adapt the wrapper sources?
So far I have avoided autotools and MakeMaker, but this should be
possible. I'm not sure it's worth the effort, though.

> The perl curses wrapper doesn't go very deep, does not for instance seem
> to use any wide-character code (though I do see a few ncurses extensions
> such as wresize - but no KEY_REZIZE).

Extending to new functionality is one thing, but for me ensuring the
current functionality in a UTF-8 environment would come first.

> The package description indicates that the package maintainer doesn't do
> development, however.  If you have an improvement for it, he indicates
> that he will incorporate it.
> 
> (It would be nice if I had time to maintain the wrappers for perl, ruby,
> python and other languages ;-).

I don't have the time right now, but I might have a look at this in a
few weeks perhaps. If I fully understand what would be needed by then.
Talking of wrappers, and out of curiosity: is there one for Java?

Greetings,
 Martin von Gagern

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