6 Jan
2015
6 Jan
'15
1:22 p.m.
Peter Jeremy scripsit:
> But you pay for the size of $TERMCAP in every process you run.
John Cowan <cowan(a)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