Timer (sysline)

[Chuck Karish]

In article <1991Mar14.115254.7998 at cbnews.att.com> mvadh at cbnews.att.com
(andrew.d.hay) writes:
>In article <1991Mar11.173124.3910 at doe.utoronto.ca> peter at doe.utoronto.ca
>(Peter Mielke) writes:
>
>"In <1991Mar08.132532.24494 at convex.com>, Tom Christiansen writes:
>"> From the keyboard of wongm at latcs1.oz.au (Mun C Wong):
>"> :Does anybody know how to write a proper background timer program that
>"> :displays the current time on the upper-right corner of screen like
>"> :exists in DOS ? 
>"> 
>"> How about lower corner?  Use sysline.
>"
>"Why restrict him to the lower corner, one can also place it in the
>"upper corner as well (just change the terminal description entry).

In general, this doesn't work.  Unless sysline is using hardware status
line capabilities, the data it prints out scrolls with the rest of the
text on the screen.  Users of terminals without status line capability
would have to use an emulator program (perhaps based on curses) to
manage all screen output.

>why cut the screen down when you already have a ststus line?

sysline is designed to use the status line.

>my first real (!"hello world") program was a clock; it used curses to
>go to the status line, read the current time, printed it, then slept
>for a settable interval.  after tuning it, i got it down to *1*
>cpu-second per 8-hour day, updating every 15 seconds!

Congratulations.  You re-invented a small part of the sysline
program.

	Chuck Karish		karish at mindcraft.com
	Mindcraft, Inc.		(415) 323-9000