pads - only for display, or form fields too?

[Sentinel]

I have written a program using a pad that assigns form fields to the pad. 
I observe:
a) the display does not respect the boundaries mentioned in prefresh. I 
get a display of form fields till end of screen (Ncurses.LINES).

b) If the number of fields exceeds what can be displayed, nothing is 
displayed.

This leads me to understand that pads are only for readonly text. Is that 
true?  My coordinates for prefresh should be correct, since I have run a 
python sample i picked up, and its working fine - it uses addch().
e.g. pad.prefresh(0,0, 5,0, 15, 75)
I should only see 10 lines of text.

--
rkumar
ruby 1.8.7  | os x 10.5.4 |  vim 7