Re: ENB: Are huge Leo outlines possible?

[jkn]

On Wednesday, December 9, 2020 at 3:11:01 PM UTC tbp1...@gmail.com wrote:

> Ah, the pdp-8, a trip down memory lane.  I used an 8i extensively in the 
> early 70s, but did not make the acquaintance of TECO.  After looking it up 
> on Wikipedia, I' m glad I didn't.  Remember how 3 ascii characters were 
> packed into two 12-bit words?  And while the 8e may have come with 12k of 
> RAM, the 8i came with 4k, unless you had the money to get the extension to 
> 8k (which ours had)
>

OT: I used a similar editor to TECO on 8-bit CP/M systems back in the early 
80's. This was PMATE, which IIRC was derived from "Mike Aronsen's Text 
Editor". You had a command line and an edit screen. The commands you could 
use in the command line were exceedingly crude, but surprisingly capable 
with a bit of practice. It was entertaining to speculate what set of 
commands a random bit of line noise would correspond to...

One of my jobs in my early working life was to customise installations like 
this so that PMATE would work in the given system. You had to configure 
simple things like screen width and height, then harder things like "how to 
move cursor to position X, Y", and then on to even more complicated things 
via custom assembly language routines.

Happy days...
   J^n


On Wednesday, December 9, 2020 at 8:35:54 AM UTC-5 David Szent-Györgyi 
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Saturday, October 24, 2020 at 1:07:15 PM UTC-4 Edward K. Ream wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 11:53 AM Thomas Passin wrote:
>>>
 Remembering back to long ago when we only had 640k of RAM at the most, 
 there were editors that kept three screens of data in memory at once - the 
 current page, the previous page, and the next page.  When the user 
 scrolled 
 forward (say), parts of the next page would be brought in, and when 
 necessary another page would be read in from disk. An analogy would be a 
 long continuous (paper) scroll, where only one part in the middle would be 
 visible at any one time.

 This scheme would seem to fit right in with your thoughts above.

>>>
>>> Alas not. Leo's clone-find commands would pull in the entire db. That's 
>>> why we need a search that is disconnected from positions and generators.
>>>
>>
>> That the clone-find commands are written to work on the entire database 
>> does not change the engineering considerations that arise from the goal of 
>> working on a database that is either too large to fit in RAM or is so large 
>> that the existing code becomes too slow for a database of the desired size 
>> even if that database does fit in RAM. 
>>
>> I suggest looking up the user manuals for the text editor in which the 
>> original Emacs was first written, namely TECO 
>> . TECO was written for 
>> DEC computers with tiny address space in which to hold text, and was 
>> written in terms of editing  the current contents of the buffer that held 
>> the address space's worth of the file under modification; it features 
>> flexible commands for paging the file's contents into the editor's buffer, 
>> allowing one to modify a file too big to fit. 
>>
>> TECO was the power user's text editor on the PDP-8/e that was the first 
>> computer I used, back in the early Seventies - a machine with 12K words of 
>> RAM, which were divided into 4096-word fields; the computer could directly 
>> address the current field as pages of 128 words, meaning that addressing 
>> the current field required indirect addressing. TECO allowed me to think in 
>> terms of a buffer without tracking fields and pages - an abstraction you 
>> might want to consider for Leo to handle "huge outlines".
>>
>> It might be of interest to note that the original Emacs was a series of 
>> macros written for TECO - Emacs originally stood for "Editor Macros". 
>>
>

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Re: ENB: Are huge Leo outlines possible?

[Edward K. Ream]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 7:35 AM David Szent-Györgyi  wrote:

>
>
> On Saturday, October 24, 2020 at 1:07:15 PM UTC-4 Edward K. Ream wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 11:53 AM Thomas Passin wrote:
>>
>>> Remembering back to long ago when we only had 640k of RAM at the most,
>>> there were editors that kept three screens of data in memory at once - the
>>> current page, the previous page, and the next page.  When the user scrolled
>>> forward (say), parts of the next page would be brought in, and when
>>> necessary another page would be read in from disk. An analogy would be a
>>> long continuous (paper) scroll, where only one part in the middle would be
>>> visible at any one time.
>>>
>>> This scheme would seem to fit right in with your thoughts above.
>>>
>>
>> Alas not. Leo's clone-find commands would pull in the entire db. That's
>> why we need a search that is disconnected from positions and generators.
>>
>
> That the clone-find commands are written to work on the entire database
> does not change the engineering considerations that arise from the goal of
> working on a database that is either too large to fit in RAM or is so large
> that the existing code becomes too slow for a database of the desired size
> even if that database does fit in RAM.
>

Yes, and those considerations have nothing to do with teco :-)

Edward

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Re: ENB: Are huge Leo outlines possible?

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

Ah, the pdp-8, a trip down memory lane.  I used an 8i extensively in the 
early 70s, but did not make the acquaintance of TECO.  After looking it up 
on Wikipedia, I' m glad I didn't.  Remember how 3 ascii characters were 
packed into two 12-bit words?  And while the 8e may have come with 12k of 
RAM, the 8i came with 4k, unless you had the money to get the extension to 
8k (which ours had).

On Wednesday, December 9, 2020 at 8:35:54 AM UTC-5 David Szent-Györgyi 
wrote:

>
>
> On Saturday, October 24, 2020 at 1:07:15 PM UTC-4 Edward K. Ream wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 11:53 AM Thomas Passin wrote:
>>
>>> Remembering back to long ago when we only had 640k of RAM at the most, 
>>> there were editors that kept three screens of data in memory at once - the 
>>> current page, the previous page, and the next page.  When the user scrolled 
>>> forward (say), parts of the next page would be brought in, and when 
>>> necessary another page would be read in from disk. An analogy would be a 
>>> long continuous (paper) scroll, where only one part in the middle would be 
>>> visible at any one time.
>>>
>>> This scheme would seem to fit right in with your thoughts above.
>>>
>>
>> Alas not. Leo's clone-find commands would pull in the entire db. That's 
>> why we need a search that is disconnected from positions and generators.
>>
>
> That the clone-find commands are written to work on the entire database 
> does not change the engineering considerations that arise from the goal of 
> working on a database that is either too large to fit in RAM or is so large 
> that the existing code becomes too slow for a database of the desired size 
> even if that database does fit in RAM. 
>
> I suggest looking up the user manuals for the text editor in which the 
> original Emacs was first written, namely TECO 
> . TECO was written for 
> DEC computers with tiny address space in which to hold text, and was 
> written in terms of editing  the current contents of the buffer that held 
> the address space's worth of the file under modification; it features 
> flexible commands for paging the file's contents into the editor's buffer, 
> allowing one to modify a file too big to fit. 
>
> TECO was the power user's text editor on the PDP-8/e that was the first 
> computer I used, back in the early Seventies - a machine with 12K words of 
> RAM, which were divided into 4096-word fields; the computer could directly 
> address the current field as pages of 128 words, meaning that addressing 
> the current field required indirect addressing. TECO allowed me to think in 
> terms of a buffer without tracking fields and pages - an abstraction you 
> might want to consider for Leo to handle "huge outlines".
>
> It might be of interest to note that the original Emacs was a series of 
> macros written for TECO - Emacs originally stood for "Editor Macros". 
>

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Re: ENB: Are huge Leo outlines possible?

[David Szent-Györgyi]

On Saturday, October 24, 2020 at 1:07:15 PM UTC-4 Edward K. Ream wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 11:53 AM Thomas Passin wrote:
>
>> Remembering back to long ago when we only had 640k of RAM at the most, 
>> there were editors that kept three screens of data in memory at once - the 
>> current page, the previous page, and the next page.  When the user scrolled 
>> forward (say), parts of the next page would be brought in, and when 
>> necessary another page would be read in from disk. An analogy would be a 
>> long continuous (paper) scroll, where only one part in the middle would be 
>> visible at any one time.
>>
>> This scheme would seem to fit right in with your thoughts above.
>>
>
> Alas not. Leo's clone-find commands would pull in the entire db. That's 
> why we need a search that is disconnected from positions and generators.
>

That the clone-find commands are written to work on the entire database 
does not change the engineering considerations that arise from the goal of 
working on a database that is either too large to fit in RAM or is so large 
that the existing code becomes too slow for a database of the desired size 
even if that database does fit in RAM. 

I suggest looking up the user manuals for the text editor in which the 
original Emacs was first written, namely TECO 
. TECO was written for 
DEC computers with tiny address space in which to hold text, and was 
written in terms of editing  the current contents of the buffer that held 
the address space's worth of the file under modification; it features 
flexible commands for paging the file's contents into the editor's buffer, 
allowing one to modify a file too big to fit. 

TECO was the power user's text editor on the PDP-8/e that was the first 
computer I used, back in the early Seventies - a machine with 12K words of 
RAM, which were divided into 4096-word fields; the computer could directly 
address the current field as pages of 128 words, meaning that addressing 
the current field required indirect addressing. TECO allowed me to think in 
terms of a buffer without tracking fields and pages - an abstraction you 
might want to consider for Leo to handle "huge outlines".

It might be of interest to note that the original Emacs was a series of 
macros written for TECO - Emacs originally stood for "Editor Macros". 

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