On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 09:28:38 -0400, Craddock, Chris wrote: > John McKown is on the money (as usual) when he says; >> Agreed, in general. That's likely the difference between a "text editor >> with enhancements" such as ISPF edit, versus an IDE for a specific >> language. I would never use ISPF to create a Java program. I use >> Netbeans. I'm easily 5x as productive using Netbeans as ISPF. But I >> wouldn't use Netbeans to edit a text file. > >ISPF is an absolutely wonderful editor for dealing with line oriented >structured text that is no longer than the width of the viewing window. >I strongly prefer an ISPF-like editor (in my case SPF/SE on windows) for >editing assembler (or Rexx or clist) source code, jcl, parmlib members >and pretty much anything I touch that naturally lives inside an 80 byte >line. It's great for that kind of thing and if those things are what you >deal with all day, then why change? > >But... while you can scroll left and right and play games with inserts >and shifts and nulls and so forth, only a masochist would claim it works >well for unstructured data and long lines. There are far better tools >for editing plain old text and for languages like C/C++, Java etc. The >SDK's for those, particularly things like Eclipse, would make an old >assembler coder weep. I have no problem at all with lines up to 140 bytes, since my ISPF screen size is routinely 62x154 (on both my desktop and my laptop). The increased size provides me with substantially more room and had the surprise benefit of additional security -- my co-workers cannot make out the text from across the aisle with the relatively small font size needed. That said, Chris' observations are otherwise on the money. While I have used ISPF to edit C and C++ code for z/OS Unix, it was far more work to do the editing in those languages than should have been necessary. And far, far more messing around there than editing a C/C++ program for a PC. (On the other hand, the mainframe C/C++ programs worked sooner... go figure!) -- Tom Schmidt Madison, WI
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