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From: adrie@philica.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: SC, curses and FP
Message-ID: <673@philica.ica.philips.nl>
Date: 21 Sep 90 14:17:37 GMT
Reply-To: adrie@.ica.philips.nl ()
Organization: Philips TDS, Innovation Centre Aachen
Lines: 24

I've been busy porting the recently posted (comp.sources.unix) SC
Spreadsheet Calculator to Minix. The port is not yet finished and I'm
not sure if I'm ever going to finish it as I only want to see whether
it is possible to port it to SparcStation Minix.

A few problems showed up. First, SC uses floating point. Minix-SPARC
supports floating point on the C level. That means, that you can add,
subtract, multiply and divide floats and doubles. I can even convert
them to and from integers and print them. Aside from the sin() and cos(),
Minix does not provide other FP functions, so I've commented out those
special spreadsheet functions, that use them.

SC uses curses routines for in/output to the terminal. I used the
recently posted curses functions from Bjorn Larsson (posted by Don Cope).
Those functions are developed on a PC and that shows! I had to modify
quite some functions, which handle screen attributes and ioctl()'s.

Currently, SC works under Minix-SPARC (without @exp(), @floor(), etc).
The curses functions are still buggy, so they should be polished up.
It's quite a nice spreadsheet, not the extensive features of 123 or
Excel, but still very usable under a multitasking OS like Minix!

Adrie Koolen (adrie@ica.philips.nl)
Philips Innovation Centre Aachen