S-Lang (programming Library) - Screen Management

Screen Management

In the mid-1990s while porting the sc spreadsheet to the S-Lang library, Davis developed the library's screen management facility. This component was designed to optimize screen output (by minimizing the number of characters sent to the terminal), and provide a simple way of supporting a variety of terminals through an extra layer of abstraction between the application code and the terminal. The slrn newsreader was the first application to make full use of this interface. Since then a number of other programs (e.g., Mutt) have taken advantage of this feature of the library, and it has become perhaps arguably the most used aspect of the library, as this component is considered to be an alternative to curses. Since version 2.0, the screen management routines have had transparent support for UTF-8.