The term::vt102 class provides emulation of most of the functions of a dec vt102 terminal. once initialised, data passed to a vt102 object is processed and the in-memory "screen" modified accordingly. this "screen" can be interrogated by the external program in a variety of ways.

this allows your program to interface with full-screen console programs by running them in a subprocess and passing their output to a vt102 class. you can then see what the application has written on the screen by querying the class appropriately.