always the same troubles with DEC: curses vs. cursesX

[Hermann Hueni]

I'm very unhappy with the philosophy DEC takes with their ULTRIX line of
UNIX.

It takes me always a long time to find out how to make work something on
the ULTRIX machine as I expect it to work. The problem with DEC seems to be
their willingness to create propriatary variants of otherwise established
defacto standards.

	* when I expect to get a bourne shell like I get it on any of the
	  other machines that I'm working on (HP,SUN,IX,NCR,...), I only get
	  a partial solution and I have to figure out myself, that there is
	  in fact a beast called 'sh5' that would be more standard.

	* When preparing a small curses demonstration program for my
	  students, I run it successfully on 5 different machines in
	  sysV & BSD derived environments with no problems at all.
	  When I finally took it onto the Decstation (where the students
	  have to work), it ran out of control or dumped core after some
	  reproducible input sequences.

	  Then, after a too long period of testing, I discovered that
	  there was a library called "cursesX", supposed to be X-Open
	  compatible. This library is basically sysV-curses but instead of
	  performing correctly, I got another misbehaviour.

	  There is no man page for "cursesX" as there is for "curses".
	  But whoever searches long enough, discovers in section "3cur"
	  a man page "intro". NOBODY ELSE HAS THIS SECTION!


The specific problem with cursesX seems to be in the routine "overwrite".

hermann

_____________
Hermann Hueni					Physiological Institute
Seidenweg 40					University of Berne
CH-3012 Bern					CH-3012 Bern - Switzerland
phone : +(41 31) [p:] 234-607			[b:] 658-726
e-mail: hueni at iam.unibe.ch			fax   : +(41 31) 654-611