Ada95 Binding for ncurses

by Jürgen Pfeifer.


General Remarks

Limitations

Hierarchy of packages

If you want to navigate through the html pages of the package specs, click here.

Implementation Details

Behind the abstraction

All the new types like Window, Panel, Menu, Form etc. are just opaque representations of the pointers to the corresponding low level (n)curses structures like WINDOW *, PANEL *, MENU * or FORM *. So you can safely pass them to C routines that expect a pointer to one of those structures.

Extended ripoffline() usage

The official documentation of (n)curses says, that the line parameter determines only whether or not exactly one line is stolen from the top or bottom of the screen. So essentially only the sign of the parameter is evaluated. ncurses has internally implemented it in a way, that uses the line parameter also to control the amount of lines to steal. This mechanism is used in the Rip_Off_Lines routine of the binding.

How user defined field types work

TBD

Enumeration fields handling

The (n)curses documentation says, that the String arrays to be passed to an TYPE_ENUM fieldtype must not be automatic variables. This is not true in this binding, because it is internally arranged to safely copy these values.

Using other Ada compilers

This should basically not be a problem.

Port to other curses implementations

Basically it should not be too hard to make all this run on a regular SVr4 implementation of curses. The problems are probably these:

I'm quite sure I forgot something.