Re: [PATCH v3] [grotty]: Use terminfo.

[G. Branden Robinson]

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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