[TUHS] termcap vs terminfo

[mah@mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton)]

On 01/06/2015 04:22 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
>> Peter Jeremy scripsit:
>>> But you pay for the size of $TERMCAP in every process you run.
> John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
>> A single termcap line doesn't cost that much, less than a KB in most cases.
> In 1981 terms, this has more weight. On a non-split I/D PDP-11 you only
> have 32KB to start with.  (The discussion a few weeks ago about cutting
> yacc down to size comes to mind...)
>
> On a Vax with 2 Meg of memory, 512 bytes is a whole page, and it might
> even be paged out, and BSD on the vax didn't have copy-on-write.
>
> ISTR that the /etc/termcap file had a comment saying something like
> "you should move the entries needed at your site to the top of this file."
> Or am I imagining it? :-)
>
> In short - today, sure, no problem - back then, carrying around a large
> environment made more of a difference.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Arnold
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
Even with TERMCAP in the environment, there's still that quadratic 
algorithm every time vi starts up.