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From: bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.unix,net.info-terms
Subject: Re: Terminfo()--Ideas needed. System V
Message-ID: <691@bu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 29-May-86 00:53:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.691
Posted: Thu May 29 00:53:09 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 30-May-86 09:01:51 EDT
Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci.
Lines: 23
Xref: watmath net.unix-wizards:18226 net.unix:7995 net.info-terms:1004


Now you have me really confused. Ok, I believe that compiled terminfo
entries are much faster than termcap entries (of course, this goes against
the grain of current technological trends, on a 750 with 20 users, sure,
bring it on!, on a SUN/3 workstation? who cares. ok, it was written when
a 750 was still "a thing".)

But there's more going on. Why couldn't I create a compiled format for
termcap? Sounds like around, oh, a full day's work or so, use DBM for
the basic lookup and read in a pre-parsed, sorted/hashed table. I
could then just rebuild that whenever my termcap file changed. Could
even compile things like cursor motion into a faster format (or am I
missing a difficulty here, surely I could gain most of the speed back.)

Obviously there has to be something else here than raw speed. I've
never looked at terminfo much tho I have it on one of the machines here.

Why is this discussion centering around speed so much? Is that the only
issue? (particularly, speed of start up, I know CCA Emacs claimed that
with terminfo screen updates were around the same as custom C screen
handlers, parsing is long over by then.)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University