macallan18@earthlink.net said:
> > Well, isn't wchar_t 32-bits on most architectures (36 on pdp10)? :-)
> umm... for some reason I assumed they were 16 bit.

As said, the "long" is an interface definition, for an indirect
function call. Whether a 16-bit type is specified or a "long"
doesn't influence performance or memory usage because calling
conventions (at least these I know) rount this up to a register
anyway. So it doesn't make sense to be stingy here.

> The drivers mentioned above just allocate one big block of
> num_chars*(sizeof(long)+sizeof(u_int))

That's probably a waste. The driver could use its internal
types here. Both attributes and character codes are opaque
to the wsdisplay layer.
(There is one exception: character codes 32..127 must be
mapped to ASCII for the system console.)

best regards
Matthias