Aucb.846
fa.editor-p
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people
Mon Apr 5 14:08:57 1982
line-at-a-time editors
>From Admin.JQJ@SU-SCORE Mon Apr 5 14:06:02 1982
There are in fact two styles of full-screen editor available for IBM
equipment. One, discussed in several previous messages, is basically
a page-at-a-time editor heavily utilizing the particular terminal's
local editing and block-mode transmission capabilities. Examples of
such an editor include the IBM program products (actually, some of these
are user-supported program products) such as Edgar, XEDIT, etc.
Since these typically run only on 3270-like terminals, the standard
pattern is to have a 3270 emulator running on a front end to perform
screen management (rather than, as some contributors have suggested
as a better alternative, a front end performing all file-editing
services).
However, there is another trend in the IBM world as well, towards
"display" editors that do use line-at-a-time I/O, do *not* require
any local editing capabilities in the terminal, but correspondingly
do not have very many "immediate" commands beyond BS during character
insertion. One advantage of such editors, of course, is that they
can more easily support a wide variety of Ascii terminals, and have
their understanding of the particular terminals more hardwired into
the program (thus improving update optimization, since the program
presumably knows its intentions better than would a separate
screen-manager front end). Another advantage is that they can
feasibly be run over slow phone lines (e.g. 1200 baud, or split speed
1200/150), and over packet-switched networks where the cost of
full-duplex single-character packets, not to mention the unacceptable
echo delay of full-duplex, makes both Emacs-style remote editing and
Edgar-style local editing unfeasible. One good example of this
latter style of program is Cornell's XEDIT (different from the IBM
XEDIT; I think Cornell has changed their name to avoid confusion),
which runs on a wide variety of Ascii terminals.
I suspect that CC.Korner really would like one of this latter style
of editors (since his original request for information specifically
mentions the wide variety of local terminals), and one written to run
on a CYBER system rather than on IBM equipment. Can anyone help him
out? If not, does anyone have a good line editor (Wylbur, perhaps?)
written in a high level language?
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