Re: NCurses APIs available for use

[Zaki, Ahmed]

Thank you Thomas for the clarification.

I understand it is not uncommon to have exported symbols not part of the API. 

My question was perhaps whether this is intentional in the case of nurses or 
not. 

I understand from what you mention that indeed it’s by design.

I merely ran nm <shared_lib> | grep “ T “ to get the exported symbols and came 
across many of the “_nc_” symbols. 

I believe their were around 748 symbols exported. 

Wanted to check if all of them need to be exported or would there be benefit in 
removing some from the list. 

Thanks

> On 26 Apr 2024, at 00:24, Thomas Dickey <dickey@his.com> wrote:
> 
> 
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> On Thu, Apr 25, 2024 at 09:19:09PM +0000, Zaki, Ahmed wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I am trying to get a definitive list of APIs available for use from Ncurses. 
> 
> API means "application programming interface".
> 
>> I looked at the man pages but one thing I found was that many functions are
>> exported from the shared library which are not documented.
> 
> sure - that's an implementation detail, not part of the "application
> programming interface".
> 
>> I am referring to functions that have the prefix “_nc_” .
>> 
>> Are those functions intended to be exported by the shared library ?
> 
> Some are exported, to be used by the ncurses utilities (tic, infocmp,
> tset, tabs, clear).  Since those are part of ncurses, they're not
> limited to the "application programming interface".
> 
> Some are exported from one module of the library to another.
> Again, not part of the "application programming interface".
> 
> If using versioned symbols, many of the _nc_ names are hidden -
> and the ones which are not, are exported as a detail of ncurses's
> implementation.  The trace- and memleaks-manpages mention a few
> of these, but they're solely of use to developers who build their
> own copy of ncurses, for analyzing problems which may or may not
> result in an update to ncurses.  The purpose and parameters to any
> of these symbols can change without affecting application developers.
> 
> Along those lines, a third of the symbols (900 of 2953) exported by glibc
> are likewise not part of its API.
> 
> -- 
> Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
> https://invisible-island.net