Re: curses vs non-ASCII

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> OK, I have just caught up with this thread and I do find it a little
> disconcerting that you claim things are not being looked after when
> you didn't get a response for a few days.

I'd have to see the specific bit of text you're talking about to be
sure, but I suspect that the "not being looked after" was more general,
more like "5.2 shipped with it being this hard to figure out how to get
the previous behaviour" than "why is nobody replying to my list mail".
I know it can take a while for people to get to mail, and it's not as
if anyone owes me a response in any case.

>>> It seems like old curses simply throw whatever it got onto the
>>> screen.
>> That's the impression I got too.  [...]
> Correct which works fine when you ASSuME that every character thrown
> at the screen results in the cursor moving one character cell.

...which is a good match to this particular problem.

> This totally fails in a couple of cases, [...]

Sure.  I can understand why curses would want to understand such things
as dead diacritics and multi-cell characters, same as I can understand
why curses would want to understand what characters are printable.
That curses is capable of those is not at issue here for me.  The issue
I have - to the extent that I have one - is that the i18n stuff makes
it harder than I think it should be to get the old behaviour back.

>> Yes, UTF-8 was the first thing I thought of when I saw the behaviour
>> too.  I didn't investigate in great detail; I was more concerned
>> with making it go away than I was with exploring the envelope of the
>> behaviour.

I assume you have by now noticed that I managed to reproduce it with a
small test program?

> At a guess I would say that you have stumbled across a character
> sequence that happens to be valid multibyte character but I haven't
> looked closely.  What does mbrtowc(3) do with that sequence?

I don't know yet, and I don't really have time to test that now.  I
should be able to put together a test within a day or two.

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