Talk:Terminal control/Positional read

Very Difficult

Just so that people know up front before trying to implement this, it is exceptionally difficult to do because “read displayed character” (whether at the current or a specific location) is not an operation that forms part of the standard set of operations. –Donal Fellows 13:01, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Or you can just not support vt100 terminals (and I am pretty sure that the basic implementations for these terminal control tasks do not support vt100 terminals, and I wonder about some of the other implementations also -- none really give any clues about hardware support).

But I also wonder about the utility of "terminal control". For most applications, on modern computers, you can do a complete update of a terminal's screen with about 2k of data. These terminal control artifacts date back to the age when 2k of data was prohibitively bulky and slow. Nowadays, except for interactive gaming, just sending a full screen replacement should be more than adequate for most tasks. And, nowadays, if I was writing an interactive game, I would much rather be working with OpenGL than with a fixed-width character based terminal.

After thinking about the hardware support issues (or lack-of-support issues), and the utility issues (or lack-of-utility issues), I have decided to stay out of this category of tasks. I think employing these concepts in a modern program would almost always be a mistake. --Rdm 14:53, 18 October 2010 (UTC)