- tion features used in the <STRONG>cup</STRONG> example, are not supported
- in BSD curses or in AT&T/USL curses before SVr4.
-
- X/Open documents only the operands for <STRONG>clear</STRONG>, <STRONG>init</STRONG> and
- <STRONG>reset</STRONG>. In this implementation, <STRONG>clear</STRONG> is part of the <EM>cap-</EM>
- <EM>name</EM> support. Other implementations of <STRONG>tput</STRONG> on SVr4-based
- systems such as Solaris, IRIX64 and HPUX as well as others
- such as AIX and Tru64 provide support for <EM>capname</EM> oper-
- ands.
-
- A few platforms such as FreeBSD and NetBSD recognize term-
- cap names rather than terminfo capability names in their
- respective <STRONG>tput</STRONG> commands.
-
- Most implementations which provide support for <EM>capname</EM> op-
- erands use the <EM>tparm</EM> function to expand parameters in it.
- That function expects a mixture of numeric and string
- parameters, requiring <STRONG>tput</STRONG> to know which type to use.
- This implementation uses a table to determine that for the
- standard <EM>capname</EM> operands, and an internal library func-
- tion to analyze nonstandard <EM>capname</EM> operands. Other
- implementations may simply guess that an operand contain-
- ing only digits is intended to be a number.
+ tion features used in the <STRONG>cup</STRONG> example, were not supported
+ in BSD curses before 4.3reno (1989) or in AT&T/USL curses
+ before SVr4 (1988).
+
+ IEEE Std 1003.1/The Open Group Base Specifications Issue
+ 7 (POSIX.1-2008) documents only the operands for <STRONG>clear</STRONG>,
+ <STRONG>init</STRONG> and <STRONG>reset</STRONG>. There are a few interesting observations
+ to make regarding that:
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> In this implementation, <STRONG>clear</STRONG> is part of the <EM>capname</EM>
+ support. The others (<STRONG>init</STRONG> and <STRONG>longname</STRONG>) do not corre-
+ spond to terminal capabilities.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> Other implementations of <STRONG>tput</STRONG> on SVr4-based systems
+ such as Solaris, IRIX64 and HPUX as well as others
+ such as AIX and Tru64 provide support for <EM>capname</EM> op-
+ erands.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> A few platforms such as FreeBSD recognize termcap
+ names rather than terminfo capability names in their
+ respective <STRONG>tput</STRONG> commands. Since 2010, NetBSD's <STRONG>tput</STRONG>
+ uses terminfo names. Before that, it (like FreeBSD)
+ recognized termcap names.
+
+ Because (apparently) <EM>all</EM> of the certified Unix systems
+ support the full set of capability names, the reasoning
+ for documenting only a few may not be apparent.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> X/Open Curses Issue 7 documents <STRONG>tput</STRONG> differently, with
+ <EM>capname</EM> and the other features used in this implemen-
+ tation.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> That is, there are two standards for <STRONG>tput</STRONG>: POSIX (a
+ subset) and X/Open Curses (the full implementation).
+ POSIX documents a subset to avoid the complication of
+ including X/Open Curses and the terminal capabilities
+ database.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> While it is certainly possible to write a <STRONG>tput</STRONG> program
+ without using curses, none of the systems which have a
+ curses implementation provide a <STRONG>tput</STRONG> utility which
+ does not provide the <EM>capname</EM> feature.