On Wed, 28 Jul 2004, Tim Jenness wrote:
> Couple of quick questions about the help apps:
>
> 1. SHL_GETHLP has these lines:
>
> * Fixed for test purposes. Note these are hardware specific.
> ANSI = .FALSE.
> LUCMD = 5
> LUTERM = 6
>
> This is quite funny given how long the code has been "in the wild". Are
> there any Starlink functions that translate STDIN and STDOUT to unit 5 and
> 6? How do we test whether a terminal is "ANSI" in the above?
No idea, but I remember that Patrick wanted the HLP library to be as
portable as possible and not tied to ADAM, so it does things it's own way.
> 2. How does ADAM deal with help monoliths. If I run scuhelp from icl, it
> loads a monolith and I get command line editing at the prompt despite the
> fact that the code seems to be using READ to get the input in the monolith
> itself. Does ICL/SUBPAR intercept something here? I assume that ICLs
> UFACE_PWHLP is called when you type "HELP" at the ICL prompt. When does
> SUP_PWHLP trigger? Why don't the ADAM help tasks use MSG_OUT? It seems
> that the output goes to STDOUT rather than over adam (and presumably there
> is a problem asssociated with obtaining the screen size over adam).
> Anyhow, I'm a bit confused over this.
ICL doesn't use the help monoliths, it reads the help files directly and
presents them itself. So no problem really.
Peter.
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