Re: Terminal IO, and menus

[Juergen.Pfeifer@t-online.de (Juergen Pfeifer)]

Jerry van Dijk wrote:
> 
> Heath Isler (isler@gfherald.infi.net) wrote:
> 
> : My question is is there a way in the stadard packages to Clear the Screen
> : and postition the cursor in a specific location, i.e. Locate_Cursor (x =>
> : 10, y =>15); ?  I am plan on using this for menus and data input.
> 
> This is an inherentely OS bounded question. For DOS, you can do this with
> the conio binding that comes with EZ2LOAD, for Win32, NT_Console does this
> sort of thing. For linux there is the curses binding, etc.
> 
> Two years ago I tried to get people to agree on a singe console control
> package standard, but there was, alas, no interest in this...
> 
Well, I'm very interested too. Of course I first suggest to port (n)curses
to DOS and Win32, which will be more simple with one of the next releases
of ncurses which redesigns some of the internals to base it on a "driver"
logic. This will make it very fast and thin on memory mapped devices like
DOS or Win32 consoles. For Ada you may then use the ncurses binding as
your cross-platform console I/O package that works on DOS, OS/2, Win32
and almost all UNIXes. 

It is for sure possible to write the above mentioned "Drivers" for the
coming new ncurses in Ada95. These drivers do only some very low level
operations on consoles.

J�rgen