S-Lang v2 and Re: SLtt_goto_rc() and qansi-m terminal

["John E. Davis" <davis>]

Dmitry Alexeyev <dmi_a@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>If direct cursor positioning is used, it works okay, but with
>drawing vertical lines (when '\n' printed to terminal) it doesn't
>work. This only happens when printing to column 0 in the screen and
>some other cases, I haven't yet figured out.

To help be better understand the problem, please provide a more
explicit example.

>"am" terminal variable is detected and set correclty for qansi-m.
>This really seems to me to be a bug in QNX console driver code, so it
>should be worked around somehow.

Are you saying that the terminal does not have "automatic margins"?
Perhaps the terminfo data base for the console needs some tweaking.

I am planning to release 1.4.9 very soon, so if there is a bug I would
like fix it before the release.

Finally, some of you might be wondering about the status of v2.  Here
is a rough sketch of my release plans for it:  

I am very busy working on adding UTF-8 support to it.  By that, I mean
everywhere in the library and not just in the screen management
routines.  For the sake of portability (Unix, Win32, VMS, etc), I had
no choice but to write my own routines for handling unicode, e.g.,,
alternatives to wcwidth, etc.  To test the code, jed, my text editor,
needs updating to handle multibyte characters.  Hence, as part of the
slang 2 effort, a fair amount of time has been spent on jed.  Once
that is complete, I will begin releasing development versions of the
library concurrent with a test release of jed.  Here is what you can
expect in the first pre-release:

   1.  UTF-8 support in all parts of the library.
   2.  Several changes to the interpreter:
   
          a. Deprecation of ERROR_BLOCK in favor of try-catch.  This
	     also means that a more extensive exception handling
	     mechanism will be added.
	     
	  b. Support for signals and signal handling in the interpreter.

   3.  S-Lang Regular Expressions will be replaced by Perl Compatible
       Regular Expressions (PCRE).
       
   4.  Several more modules, including a PVM module to allow slang
       scripts to interface to the Parallel Virtual Machine library.
       In fact, I am using this module now as part of my research.  
       These modules may be made available separately before 2.x
       is released.  If you are interested in the PVM module now, let
       me know and I will make it available.

I am trying very hard to make the version 2 API as compatible as
possible with the version 1 API.  However, some things have had to go,
e.g., SLang_Error will no longer be available as a simple variable.

I hope to have the first snapshot available no later than this fall.

Thanks,
--John