TC's windows with 'curses'?

[Joe English]

jkuha at cc.helsinki.fi (Jorma Kuha) writes:
>Has anybody had any experience on converting TurboC's Text Mode Window
>Routines to 'curses' on unix? There are only 20 such routines on TurboC,
>so that rewriting them with curses should not be such a big job, or is
>it? What kind of problems will arise? Any ftp-site, where they are already?


One problem you may run into: under curses, most of the screen 
manipulation calls modify a private buffer; when you've finished
writing to the buffer, you call refresh() and curses figures out
the "best" way to make the actual terminal display match what's
in the buffer.  (It works this way so it can optimize screen-oriented
programs over a serial line.)  I'm not familiar with Turbo's 
text mode routines, but I'd be surprised if they didn't immediately
update the screen.  You may be able to find a way to map curses
routines to the Turbo equivalents, but you'll also have to 
add calls to refresh() throughout the rest of the code.  How
easy this is will depend on how modular the code is to start
with.


--Joe English

  jeenglis at alcor.usc.edu