[Info-vax] improving EDT

[Craig A. Berry]

On 11/17/16 4:43 PM, David Froble wrote:
> Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
>
>> But, we are only talkning about giving (new) programmers
>> on VMS a decent environment to work in. I do not understand
>> why you drag clouds and all that stuff into the picture.
>>
>> I do not understand your post. Are you saying that editing code in
>> EDT/TPU is "better" then editing code in one of todays popular IDE's?
>
> Ok, let me try explaining this way.
>
> Does any of these "new" "wizz-bang" methods have enough advantage for me
> to forget using EDT, which I pretty much got down to "muscle memory",
> and spend effort (don't know how much) learning something new?
>
> Key words are "enough advantage" ....

I resisted for some years the trend toward autocomplete, syntax
highlighting, on-the-fly type checking, standardized formatting,
applying the same edit to multiple lines at once, debugging within the
editor, etc. It is pretty hard to learn this stuff when you learned the
EDT keypad with your ABCs decades ago, but it's also hard to do without
once you make the effort.

Example: when you type

%INCLUDE "XYZ.INC"

in one of your BASIC programs, what if the editor put a red squiggle
under "XYZ.INC" if it couldn't find the file, letting you know
immediately that you had a typo? You wouldn't have to wait until you try
to compile it to see the problem. LSE was a step in the right direction,
but still separated compilation from editing.

So then multiply that times a hundred because there are dozens of
productivity boosters in a modern editor that the native VMS editors
don't do. Whether this is "enough advantage" for you personally is
something only you personally can determine. But marketing any system
today without these capabilities would just be embarrassing.