Aucbvax.5101
fa.editor-p
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people
Wed Nov 11 01:06:57 1981
Text Formatting
>From CHILENSKAS@USC-ISIE Tue Nov 10 23:38:44 1981
       I  agree  that  this  seems  to  be  the  right  place  to  discuss
integrating editors into various other portions of the system such as  text
formatting, program formatting and  compilation, etc.  The  representations
one uses  for text  can  make it  hard or  impossible  to use  current  (or
desirable) editors on that text.  Integrating editors into mail systems and
the  programming  cycle   is  another  area   that  requires  thought   for
representation and program interfacing.   It is relatively  nice to have  a
command to switch back  and forth between the  editor and compiler, but  it
would be nicer to do incremental compiling or interpreting during the  edit
session itself.  IBM was suppose to  have such a system for COBOL,  FORTRAN
and 370 BAL back in 1975 but the people at Olin who evaluated it said  that
the COBOL interface  was clumsy.  It  took lots of  time per statement  and
still did not catch a  lot of errors.  The  error messages flashing at  you
were distracting to the main task of programming.  In text editing there is
the question of "what you see is what you get" - obviously impossible on  a
typical one font  terminal if  what you  are really  doing is  typesetting.
Where are  the  reasonable compromises?   Which  of these  compromises  are
likely to change as hardware gets cheaper?  With work stations?  These  are
the kinds of  questions i had  hoped to  hear addressed when  i joined  the
list.
                                       R Mark Chilenskas
                                       Chilenskas@ISIE
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