Re: problems revealed by new demos

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Ethan Merritt wrote:

>On Friday 01 October 2004 03:13 am, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:
>  
>
>>*) I don't see why we should need a new term API entry for
>>    setting the output.  Yes, the output file is currently a global
>>    variable, which is bad from a structural point of view.  But I really
>>    don't see why a modification of a single terminal driver should be
>>    allowed to change the API.  If we want to change the API, that's a
>>    separate issue, to be discussed independently.
>>    
>>
>
>That is the discussion I hoped to trigger.
>I agree it is not a good thing to change the API for only one driver.
>But a change to TERM_TABLE might resolve the more general
>problem seen in vector.dem, that the sequence 
>	set term push
>	set term <new>
>	set output
>	replot
>	set term pop
>loses the original output setting.
>
>Adding an actual terminal-specific function may not be useful,
>but storing the output fd (or maybe the string used to open it)
>in the TERM_TABLE is an interesting idea.  Then each driver would
>have its own output stream, and you could ' set term push/pop/<new>'
>all day without having them trample on each other's output.
>

Sounds good.  Would calling the same terminal after a push be a problem? 
 (Can't think of a reason to use that, but a user might do it by 
accident and get a resulting "file write" error after popping back the 
first terminal instance.

Dan