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000019_icon-group-sender _Sun May 21 16:05:29 1995.msg
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1995-09-18
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Sun, 21 May 1995 14:11:35 MST
To: icon-group-l@cs.arizona.edu
Date: Sun, 21 May 1995 16:05:29 GMT
From: goer@quads.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Message-Id: <D8xrD6.Kwy@midway.uchicago.edu>
Organization: The University of Chicago
Sender: icon-group-request@cs.arizona.edu
References: <3pmllc$6eh@umbc8.umbc.edu>
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Subject: Long response re Icon screen handling routines
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
In article <3pmllc$6eh@umbc8.umbc.edu>, R. D. Davis <rdavis4@umbc.edu> wrote:
>
>There's just one problem: screen handling. I noticed the routines
>such as iscreen, but they seem geared mainly toward terminals that can
>upport ANSI, such as VT-xxx terminals.
Those routines are just bare minimums. The low-level library is iolib.icn,
and it will support anything your termcap file will support.
But these are low-level routines. There is no high-level curses for Icon.
Nor will there be - unless you write it :-). Once upon a time, a couple
of entrepreneurs built a really nice, commercial version of Icon that had
marvellous support for character-based terminals. But sales were, well,
abysmal. There were no apps to show off its capabilities, and the system
only ran on i386 machines, as I recall. I was sad to see it go, but there
was just no market for it.
Nowadays, if this project were done again, I don't think the extensions
would be built into the base Icon run-time system, but rather into dynam-
ically loadable libraries. For some time now, Icon has suffered from
feeping creaturism, and its maintainers have been trying to keep down
its size and concentrate their remaining resources on porting and the
graphics facilities.
Once you get the hang of it, Icon is one of the easiest environments to
work in anywhere. As one fellow said to me, programmers become religiously
attached to their environments. Although I do most of my programming in
C these days, I still feel a certain sadness that I can't do everything
in Icon. I'm afraid that if you want to do curses-like stuff, you will
be back with C, too - unless you want to write a set of Icon screen hand-
ling routines.
--
Richard L. Goerwitz *** goer@midway.uchicago.edu