Nadav Har'El wrote:
Another presentation was given there on a similar topic by Eli Zaretskii
who focused, believe it or not, on the MS-DOS EinsteinWriter (yes, this
editor was an antique even at that time ;-)), and how well it treated
(in his opinion) cursor movement. I'm not sure Eli's opinions were the same
as Doug's:
http://www.m17n.org/conference/m17n2000_all_but_registration/proceedings/zaretskii/m17n2000.ps.gz
Haven't read any of the presentations yet - all this is from memory and
personal experience.
Einstein stored stuff, internally, using a visual memory layout. As a
result, all reordering decisions were taken during input (rather than
the way more traditional today - input gets stored in the same order it
is done, and reordering takes place during output. In fact, input order
pretty much defines what "logical order" means). As a result, Einstein
had some pretty unsolvable scenarios which it coped with by having a
"typewriter mode" - direct visual input of code.
On the major plus side - this mode was clear to everyone. No one had to
ask themselves "what should I do in order to get the right result?". On
the negative side, the world has gone past the age of fixed width
non-editable text input.
Einstein is a fond memory as far as simplicity goes, but there it ends.
I do NOT want to go back to that. I worked with it too long ago to
remember the details, but I vaguely remember the sigh of relief I had
when I moved to logical order editors as far as line splitting and
English text in Hebrew paragraphs. If anyone has a copy of Einstein
around, I'll be glad to play with it and refresh my memory.
Shachar
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