Dear Thomas,
the latest (5.5-20060909) ncurses does not compile on Mac OS X 10.4.7,
since _POSIX_VDISABLE is defined in <sys/unistd.h> as
#define _POSIX_VDISABLE ((unsigned char)'\377')
and used in progs/tset.c as follows
#if defined(_POSIX_VDISABLE) && (_POSIX_VDISABLE != -1)
resulting in the following error
.../progs/tset.c:689:34: error: missing binary operator before token "char"
I.e. the cast operator (unsigned char) may not work at compile time.
It is a known problem. Please, take a look at
WG15 Defect Report Ref: 9945-1-27
Topic: _POSIX_VDISABLE symbol
http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG15/docs/rr/9945-1/9945-1-27.html
and
cast vs. suffixes
http://www.gatago.com/comp/lang/c/2769753.html