Bob Bridges wrote on 8/16/2023 8:23 AM:
Too many years ago; I don't remember. And it isn't as if "unintuitive" is a
fatal error in editors or any other application; TECO (anyone ever use
that?) is a powerful editor - it was on the PDP platform as I recall - with
early automation features that I used extensively, and it was full of odd
uses for <ESC> and '$' and some other characters, but it did a good job -
once I was used to it. But whatever this Unix editor was, a half hour
wasn't enough for me to learn much about it or get used to anything.
---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
/* People who can't distinguish between "etymology" and "entomology" bug me
in ways I cannot put into words. -Tal Waterhouse */
IBM-MAIN relevancy: ISPF EDIT still rules! (But now I should learn
regexps.)
I never tried TECO, after reading "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL"
40 years ago. Extract:
Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been
incorporated into
editors running on more reasonably named operating systems -- EMACS and VI
being two. The problem with these editors is that Real Programmers
consider
"what you see is what you get" to be just as bad a concept in Text
Editors as
it is in women. No the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you
got it"
text editor -- complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous.
TECO, to
be precise.
It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely
resembles transmission line noise than readable text [4]. One of the more
entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a
command line
and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while
talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse --
introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine.
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