Minor CLP Progress

Real life is taking a lot of time lately so there isn't much new, but whatever.

The UNIX API is quite wide. There is more available, but I wrapped at least the subset that the relevant Scheme SRFI found most useful for Fleng. This proved a good exercise of the FFI & wrapper generator. It's also the furthest I got with contributing to various compilers and interpreters over the years.

SRFI 170: POSIX API

Flenglibs, libraries for FLENG

I also returned to cursor-addressable interfaces. Although perhaps out-of-fashion now, I think they make loads of sense for an "admin interface", because they can be readily used on cloud VMs. Even if users might prefer something prettier ...

One interesting thing I found is that for modern ncurses, there are better terminal definitions than the xterm-256color that I had been using. Apple Terminal is better described by "nsterm"; and Putty by "putty". This is supported by late versions of ncurses, which even OpenBSD is using now, but not Apple, so it's best to use ncurses from Homebrew on that platform. Less importantly, this also allows using the terminfo "hs", "tsl" and "fsl" properties with tput to change the window status line from the shell, instead of hard-coding escape sequences.

Curses terminal capabilities

I thought it was interesting that using a standardized library (curses) makes sense because it supports other software that wasn't originally considered. For programming languages, the opposite often seems to be true and the non-standard dialects have better support.

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