On Fri, 29 Jan 2021, at 03:27, David Crayford wrote: > No offense taken. You may find it far fetched but it's true. I'm > cognizant to the fact that most folks on here only know ISPF > and have no experience of using an IDE or text editor > like vim or emacs.
I think it's pretty likely that many (if not most) people here will have used a great many text editors, though maybe not recently. In my case, I wrote one when I was a student. It wasn't very good, but one written by a peer was so good that the whole student body, staff etc all stopped using the system-provided one (on DEC VAXes running, I suppose, VMS). Later, though while still a student, I wrote one in APL (for IBM) which vaguely resembled Xedit (though only had a handful of commands) but still made editing of APL functions a whole lot easier than with the default editor in APL. Later, I wrote a PF-key driven editor (that is users did not have to remember any commands; everything they did was selected by pressing various PF keys whose labels (and actions) were context sensitive. That was designed for use by very naive users who did not have (allocated lecture-course) time to learn to use anything complex. In the 1980s, I wrote from scratch a structured editor which, I guess, would be a bit like a document editor that these days would read a DTD to determine the syntax etc of a language and allow a valid XML document that complied with that DTD to be edited. I invented the definition language, wrote a parser and compiler for it, then wrote the editor to use the compiled skeletal framework. And... it was all done in COBOL as that was the only licenced/supported language my employers would let me do it in. It had to be able to handle documents whose size exceeded the addressable working storage size of the COBOL compiler we had (and certainly exceeded the spare space there after all the program's own working storage structures were defined), and of course it had to handle free format text and variable length strings. I started off by implementing a sort of paging subsystem that dynamically paged parts of the document that was being edited in and out of work files, and designed that so that the values stored in those files - both user data & control tables for the document structure could be arbitrary sizes. The editor also had a (programmers-only) interactive debugger which could follow linked-lists of data, and force garbage collection of that managed storage etc). On RISC OS systems I've used the default editor (which is poor, somewhat like Notepad) and a programmers' editor named StrongED, which is not quite an IDE but is very powerful ... but dates back to when systems had only a few MB of RAM. On Windows PCs I've used around four other programmers' editors, but lack of scriptability, or a requirement to learn a script language that was only usable inside that editor and a command set that didn't directly relate to the commands users used (or actions only available from mouse operated menus and no command line), made using them a struggle compared with Kedit... even allowing for the fact that I started to use Kedit for real more than 20 years after I last used Xedit, with 18 or so years' use of ispf edit in the middle period to confuse me. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
