I've begun implementing a support library for curses in Python. Along the way, I became curious why the project was called curses to begin with. According to one NCURSES documentation, the name is explained thuslyCurses is a pun on the name cursor optimizationI don't get it. How is CURSES a pun for cursor optimization?Note: I'm not sure what stack exchange this question belongs in. Trying here and open to suggestions on where to move the question.
How is CURSES a pun for cursor optimization?
unix;command line
Part of what curses does is optimize cursor control sequences so (for example) to backspace all the way to the beginning of a line, instead of writing out a bunch of back-space characters, it can issue one command to move the cursor to the beginning of the line, and one more to erase to the end of the line. At least at one time, it had a fair amount of logic to figure out the shortest sequence of characters it could write to accomplish a particular command (though many recent ones probably don't bother--it's no longer nearly as important as it was in the days of a terminal connected at 300 or 1200 bit per second).The name is optimizing the (relatively long) sequence of characters cursor optimization down to the much shorter sequence of characters curses.