Hi, On Sun, Jan 29, 2023 at 3:01 PM Mart Zirnask <martzirn...@gmail.com> wrote: > > If I manage to build the command line mode of Rob Pike's sam editor > [1] for DOS, I could probably do a writeup on how to use it. Because > of the so-called structural regular expressions [2, 3], it is a really > interesting editor. Excellent for processing arbitrary strings that > spawn across multiple lines, since sam doesn't expect the input to be > full, terminated lines.
I've heard of it but never used it. It's very interesting. Plan9's successor to Ed, right? (Grep and Sed both came from Ed. Even AWK took the regex code from Egrep, I think.) > I'm definitely more of an end user, but I like the simplicity of both > DOS and traditional Unix tools. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism_(computing) "modularity", "reusability" (e.g. tools), easy to use and combine with other programs (using plain text input and output) "do one thing (only) and do it well" "keep it simple", "you ain't gonna need it", "make everything a filter" But some people *hate* simple (e.g. text) interfaces. "UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -- Dennis M. Ritchie "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success." -- Dennis M. Ritchie "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein (also often quoted by Niklaus Wirth) (Replace "UNIX" and "C in the above quotes with "DOS". That's how I feel.) (In fairness, if a tool requires a genius, you've designed it wrong. Most people aren't geniuses. It should be easy to use, but that doesn't mean bloat and unnecessary complications and fancy interfaces.) "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" -- Brian Kernighan > An article about "Ultra minimal minimal minimal FreeDOS" (which is how > I sense SvarDOS) might be interesting to many curious (newbie-) > readers, I suppose. How to stripe FreeDOS only to the most essential > components. Yes, definitely, but (for instance) my MetaDOS never caught on and few ever used it. I greatly respect Mateusz's work, but I never found the time to try out SvarDOS. (I see he's responding below already.) _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
