[BRLTTY] Low-level BrlAPI questions

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Aura Kelloniemi on 2021/04/15 at 13:19 +0300]

> > I do not really see the use of being able to pass different sizes.
> > That's most probably a sign of a bug in the application output preparing
> > code, which the programmer would rather want to catch.
>
>You are probably right. The only case where the programmer may not care about
>the size of the output is when they want to just send some text on the
>display, and hope that it fits. For example brltty-ttb and apitest work this
>way in some situations.

I disagree, but maybe not for an obvious reason. The fact is that bindings like Tcl, Java, Python (and maybe Rust) have arrays, sequences, or whatever. These things are constructed and have a size. This is a common case - the fact that C lacks this is the exception. That's one big reason why I think the write arguments should include optional sizes for the masks. Then the bindings could just set those fields and let some well-defined, common handling take place underneath.

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