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From: silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: standards for windowing software?
Message-ID: <1990Oct20.123109.7287@cs.dal.ca>
Date: 20 Oct 90 12:31:09 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Habitat Ecology Div., Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
Lines: 26

I'd appreciate it if anyone could clarify a confusing dialogue I've been
having with a local HP salesman about the way some software works in
windows.

I'm in the market for a Unix workstation and have been looking at the HP
400 series machines.  Working with VUE I discovered that programs like
vi and more assume a 24x80 window and won't adjust to work with any
other size (for example, with a longer window they use only the top 24
lines).  I commented that this seemed like a pretty serious shortcoming.

The salesman just contacted me and said that he spoke to HP's software
engineers, and they claim that by doing this HP is maintaining some kind
of standard.  Software that adjusts to the actual window size is in
their opinion "non-standard".

Can anyone explain this to me?  Since vi and more get the screen size
from termcap or terminfo when they load, what is nonstandard about
getting the size of a window as well, which is after all a virtual
terminal?  I can understand not adjusting to a resized window, but when
you load a program it seems to me it should use the window you are in.

-- 
William Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division, Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2.  Tel. (902)426-1577
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