RE: tn5250 fixed (I hope)

Hi,

On Wed, 17 May 2000 wsuetholz@centonline.com wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> <RAMBLE>
> That behavior was actually started in SysV 3.2 on the Intel 386.  On the
> AT&T 3B2 system with SysV3.2 it NULL actually pointed to 0 because of the
> memory being initialized.  This has caused some errors that are still in 
> some system programs on the systems derived from Intel SysV 3.2 which UW 
> is.  Even UW7 which, in my opinion has too much SCO, has some of these types
> of problems.  The usual one being a sloppy check of command line arguments
> by comparing them to '\0' instead of (char *)NULL.
> 
> The above made my life very difficult when I was porting software from the
> 3B2's to the AT&T Intel based systems.  I even reported it as a bug to AT&T
> at the time, and they said it wasn't their problem, it was the problem of
> sloppy programmers checking character 0 instead of NULL pointer.
> </RAMBLE>
> 
> Hope the above wasn't to out of place...

Not at all.  This problem affects more than pointers too.  As an example,
there is a new integer structure member which determines whether the
telnet code should act as host or server.  On Linux it is initialized to
zero as part of memory allocation.  On UW 7 it isn't.  So on Linux
everything works fine but on UW it tries to act like a server.  Of course
the problem is in the program, not UW.  I know that there is a calloc
function which initializes memory, but somehow that just seems like a good
way to hide a bug. 
 
> As far as the key handleing goes..  Are you using the ncurses libraries
> or the curses libraries?  Mine was working last time I checked using the
> ncurses library on UW 2.1.  Of course that was a while ago..
> 
> Bill Suetholz

I was so happy to get everything compiled last night that I didn't even
mess with the keyboard.  I'm not sure if ncurses is installed, and also I
don't think the termcap is applied properly, since that is platform
specific.

Mostly I'm just interested in the lib5250 library at the moment.  I'm
going to be enhancing it for use in the TN5250 -> LU6.2 gateway.

Mike


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