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

[Michael Moroney]

helbig at asclothestro.multivax.de (Phillip Helbig (undress to reply)) writes:

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

>> 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?

I never looked at that one, it was never a problem for me. Again it's almost
obvious they used an unsigned word for the line count.  The whole code will
have hardcoded constants everywhere, if the terminal line count and line lengths
are any hints. Much depends on how that variable is used and what it is compared
to and so forth.

>> 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.  :-)

Much to the chagrin of Hoff..
There were a few people at VSI who stopped by to ask for my update or to
thank me.

>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).

I never could get used to EVE in EDT mode. There always were enough differences
that bugged me. I will see if the recently posted EVE_INIT.EVE can be updated
to include ones not already in it.

Not the first time I went against the grain with editors. In college, the
engineering and CS departments pushed an editor developed locally by a professor
there. All classes which had terminal access (we still used punched cards) taught
the local editor in the class. Someone else got a hold of another editor, and I
prefered it. I even got the source code and improved it somewhat. (these were all
line mode editors, primitive even compared to EDT. The editor that came with the
operating system (CDC NOS) was absolutely horrible, nobody used it)