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Subject: Re: TRYING TO MAKE EXE RUN ON FRIENDS MACHINE
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:09:23 -0800 (PST)
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On Jan 12, 3:41 am, Jim Michaels <jmich DOT  DOT  DOT  AT yahoo DOT com> wrote:

> I would also like to see a name change for the pdcurses library.  The
> name should be something more like what it does, like cursorxy, which
> happens to fit in 8 characters.

Yeah, that's that gonna happen.

I'm sure the name looks like gibberish to some people, but it has
historical significance and ongoing meaning. The "curses" part, as
you've already hinted, is a reference to cursor control. But more
specifically, it's named after the original Unix "curses" library --
and more than just named for it, it's a clone of it. Almost all the
functions, etc., are derived from that original, and it continues to
aim at compatibility with other implementations, like ncurses. It also
aims at conformance to the X/Open Curses specification:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcurses/curses.h.html

You could say the original curses library's name was a bit cutesy,
but, what's done is done -- it's established. And for me, cross-
platform development, and especially the ability to port Unix software
to non-Unix platforms, is the primary purpose of PDCurses.

As for the "PD", it stands for "public domain". In the beginning, it
was "PCcurses" -- curses for the MSDOS PC.  (PCcurses, like ncurses,
was derived from Pavel Curtis' original ncurses, also sometimes
referred to as "pcurses".) Then it expanded to other platforms. Being
"PD" may not really be its distinguishing feature, although it was
rare at the time. But it's had this name (and status) for something
like 19 years now.