"Malcolm" <ma*****@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
#
# "Derk Gwen" <de******@HotPOP.com> wrote in message
# > An inherent aspect of curses is that it is intended to draw only ASCII
# > character on a rectangular grid on a terminal or terminal emulator. If
# > you want fancier graphics, you're going to need X-Windows or
# > OpenGL.
# > X-Windows should be available on most Linux installs.
# >
# ASCII characters are basically Latin alphanumerics, a bit of punctuation,
# and a few non-printed controls. However most terminals have an extended
# 8-bit character set, the ANSI set, which includes characters designed for
# simple boxes and menus and the like. I would be surprised if curses doesn't
# support these.
curses was originally written when signedness of C char was subject to
speculation; only codes 0 through 127 could be used portably; and those
were the only available codes on the terminals then targetted. Programs
like vi did (do?) use the extra bit for other purposes. I don't know how
curses has evolved: I wouldn't trust it with codes 128 through 255 without
clear documentation that it could handle those.
Also codes 128 through 255 have wildly different interpretations on
different machines, a chaos slowly being colonised with Unicode.
--
Derk Gwen
http://derkgwen.250free.com/html/index.html
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