On 30/01/2021 3:44 am, Seymour J Metz wrote:
I would guess that there are more people here who have written a text editor
than there are who have used only one.
In that case why don't you contribute to the lspf project. You mentioned
it didn't support file tailoring so jump in and implement it. I'm sure
the maintainer will welcome a PR with open arms.
Or maybe, you just talk a good game ;)
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of
Jeremy Nicoll [jn.ls.mfrm...@letterboxes.org]
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021 2:06 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: ISPF for mainframe Linux
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.
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