and so can you http://philip.greenspun.com/tcl/

dearest /prog/

I am trying to write an instant messaging program in C. I have come to a brick wall, however. how do I handle these three things concurrently: refreshing the display (in my case, a basic ncurses window), accepting input (stdin), writing & reading from the socket?

the main issue is that input blocks anything else from happening. is it possible to pass the file descriptor for stdin to another thread, then for that thread to update the char* array for the input ncurses window, then that is finally updated by the main thread? then, after the input is 'ready', it is written to the socket.

meanwhile, the read thread would accept and write data to a char** array, holding the data for the recent messages (which is then updated by the main thread thru ncurses windows).

am i thinking in any logical sense? how would you wizards accomplish this? also, to reiterate my question, could I pass the stdin file descriptor to another thread which then processes it?

thx

Let's write a good, small, compact, extensible, standards-compliant and feature-full web browser that doesn't send the user's private info to the Big Brother.

Oy vey! The Z80 has built-in BCD instructions! Better add those to x86! 8 bits at a time is good enough for Z80, it's good enough for us!
Oy vey! Floating point is popular! Can't let those third-party accelerators beat us! Better rush out some notoriously difficult to program stack FPU turd!
Oy vey! VAX has 4 security rings! Better make sure we have 4 too so OSes that use them all are hard to port to RISC!
Oy vey! PowerPC has AltiVec SIMD instructions! Better whip up some half-assed shit called MMX and pretend it's innovative!
Oy vey! MMX is half-assed shit! Better make an improved sequel called SSE! Follow that up with AVX! If Hymiewood can sell the goyim the same shit over and over again, we can too!
Oy vey! Real computers have VMs! Better add some privileged VM instructions so hypervisors are forced to run in kernel mode!
Oy vey! I think I missed a few ``innovations''!

If you used a real man's programming language like Lisp or ML then you would have no need for gdb and it's (false) friends.

Having to debug a program is (IMO) a sign of sloppiness and shows that what you've set out to do is beyond your intellectual capacity to bring to completion.

Coulombs should be the SI base unit for charge, not derived as Ampere•seconds!

Why GCC never spits crap like the following?

  failed AVER: (NULL CURRENT)
This is probably a bug in SBCL itself. (Alternatively, SBCL
might have been corrupted by bad user code, e.g. by an undefined
Lisp operation like (FMAKUNBOUND 'COMPILE), or by stray pointers
from alien code or from unsafe Lisp code; or there might be a
bug in the OS or hardware that SBCL is running on.) If it seems
to be a bug in SBCL itself, the maintainers would like to know
about it. Bug reports are welcome on the SBCL mailing lists,
which you can find at <http://sbcl.sourceforge.net/>;;.
   [Condition of type SB-INT:BUG]

April fools!

Have you ever tried sex? Would you recommend it to everyone?