Re: ISO 2022 and termcap ballast

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

Bram Moolenaar wrote on 1999-11-03 22:07 UTC:
> Read which standard?  This can't be the only one.  Why else would there be a
> termcap/terminfo database with so many entries?

Almost all termcap/terminfo entries are useless today, because these
terminals do not exist any more. Almost everyone uses vt100, xterm,
linux, or a very closely related terminal definition, and all of these
are pretty much simple subsets of ISO 6429 and ISO 2022 with some
private extensions (usually, but unfortunately not always, using one of
the private extension sequences reserved by ISO 6429 and ISO 2022). The
Linux console is a particularly bad offender, where some people
introduced blindly private extension sequences with a syntax very far
off the ISO standards (most likely due to ignorance of the standard and
the ESC sequence syntax principles).

If it weren't for our historic collectors mentality, termcap/terminfo
could very easily be reduced today to somewhere between 1 and 5 entries.

Pre ANSI/ISO terminals such as the VT52 or the Hazeltine might still be
around in the stores of the Cambridge University Computer Preservation
Society, or in Frank da Cruz's famous archive on the history of video
terminals, but not anything you would find in a commonly used
configuration after the mid 1980s. (Exceptions just confirm the rule.)

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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