+ The <STRONG>reset_color_pairs</STRONG> function is an extension of <EM>ncurses</EM>.
+
+
+</PRE><H2><a name="h2-HISTORY">HISTORY</a></H2><PRE>
+ SVr3.2 introduced color support to curses in 1987.
+
+ SVr4 made internal changes, e.g., moving the storage for the color
+ state from <STRONG>SP</STRONG> (the <EM>SCREEN</EM> structure) to <STRONG>cur_term</STRONG> (the <EM>TERMINAL</EM>
+ structure), but provided the same set of library functions.
+
+ SVr4 curses limits the number of color pairs to 64, reserving color
+ pair zero (0) as the terminal's initial uncolored state. This limit
+ arises because the color pair information is a bitfield in the <STRONG>chtype</STRONG>
+ data type (denoted by <STRONG>A_COLOR</STRONG>).
+
+ Other implementations of curses had different limits:
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> PCCurses (1987-1990) provided for only eight (8) colors.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> PDCurses (1992-present) inherited the 8-color limitation from
+ PCCurses, but changed this to 256 in version 2.5 (2001), along with
+ changing <STRONG>chtype</STRONG> from 16-bits to 32-bits.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> X/Open Curses (1992-present) added a new structure <STRONG>cchar_t</STRONG> to store
+ the character, attributes and color pair values, allowing increased
+ range of color pairs. Both color pairs and color-values used a
+ signed <STRONG>short</STRONG>, limiting values to 15 bits.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> <EM>ncurses</EM> (1992-present) uses eight bits for <STRONG>A_COLOR</STRONG> in <STRONG>chtype</STRONG>
+ values.
+
+ Version 5.3 provided a wide-character interface (2002), but left
+ color pairs as part of the attributes-field.
+
+ Since version 6 (2015), ncurses uses a separate <STRONG>int</STRONG> for color pairs
+ in the <STRONG>cchar_t</STRONG> values. When those color pair values fit in 8 bits,
+ ncurses allows color pairs to be manipulated via the functions
+ using <STRONG>chtype</STRONG> values.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> NetBSD curses used 6 bits from 2000 (when colors were first
+ supported) until 2004. At that point, NetBSD changed to use 10
+ bits. As of 2021, that size is unchanged. Like <EM>ncurses</EM> before
+ version 6, the NetBSD color pair information is stored in the
+ attributes field of <STRONG>cchar_t</STRONG>, limiting the number of color pairs by
+ the size of the bitfield.