[Info-vax] x86 Update 4/22/19

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <qa1rlc$evg$3 at pcls7.std.com>, moroney at world.std.spaamtrap.com
(Michael Moroney) writes: 

> helbig at asclothestro.multivax.de (Phillip Helbig (undress to reply)) writes:
> 
> >Similarly, at some point EDT was VESTed or whatever.  But I recall 
> >someone here saying that he had a new version, removing the 255 and 
> >65535 limits.
> 
> No, there was never a need to VEST EDT, it does build on Alpha and Itanic. 

OK; must have been thinking of TECO.

> I am the
> guy who modified EDT. I removed the hardcoded all-terminals-have-24-lines
> assumptions that hasn't been true since DECwindows had virtual terminal 
> windows of any size, not the 255 characters/line limit.  

> 255 characters/line assumption is much harder to remove 

In practice, this isn't really a problem for me; if a file does contain 
longer lines, I probably wouldn't edit it with EDT, but modify it with a 
program or whatever.

Another limit I hit more often is the 65535 lines which can be processed 
in one command.  Any chance of increasing that limit?

> This EDT was checked in about two years ago in a version of VMS that
> would be V8.5 but probably won't see the light of day since there really
> aren't enough customer-visible new features/changes (EDT didn't count
> :-) ) to release it. Lots of stuff under the hood that will be needed
> for V9.x however. 

It's good to hear that EDT will stay with us forever.  :-)

Yes, I know about EVE/TPU, and use it occasionally, mainly when I need a 
LEARN sequence (haven't quite mastered that in EDT yet).  Yes, there is 
EDT emulation, but just the keypad.  I have lots and lots of EDT macros.
Also, I don't like the way that EVE loads the whole file even if I don't 
need it, and I hate the cursor behaviour (I want the end of a line to be 
the end of a line; also, I want to backspace before a line to the end of 
the previous line).