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5.1 The naming of routines

When you look at this library, it may seem that exclamation points and question marks were sprinkled at random on the ends of curses functions. There is actually a thought process behind it: it isn’t just chaos.

• A procedure that returns #t or #f and does not change the behavior of the system in any way ends in a question mark, e.g. has-ic?.
• But, a procedure that returns #t or #f and does change the behavior of the system does not end in a question mark, e.g. beep.
• A procedure that changes any property of curses but does not write to a window or screen ends in an exclamation point, e.g. bkgdset!.
• Any procedure that writes to a window or screen does not in an exclamation point, e.g. addch.
• Curses integer constants are capitalized and use underscores, for example A_BOLD.
• Curses procedures are not capitalized, even if they were capitalized macros in the C Ncurses library, for example lines and tabsize.