[Info-vax] Editors, was: Re: VT keyboard replacement

[Ian Miller]

On Monday, November 22, 2021 at 2:41:00 PM UTC, Robert A. Brooks wrote:
> On 11/21/2021 10:19 PM, Michael Moroney wrote: 
> > On 11/21/2021 4:32 AM, alanfe... at gmail.com wrote: 
> > 
> >> BTW, why did it take so long for someone to fix the hard-coded 22-line 
> >> limit on EDT? How long could it have taken? Well, I'm very happy about it 
> >> now! 
> > 
> > That "someone" is myself. As to why did it "take so long", EDT was 
> > considered obsolete for decades. Nobody was actively maintaining it. I just 
> > recently posted some comments about fixing it. It was an unofficial fix, I 
> > just did it one day. But EDT fans may be happy to know that EDT was the first 
> > editor to run on x86. I forget why EVE/TPU took longer, it may have been a 
> > compiler bug that affected it but not EDT. A different problem prevented EDT 
> > from working out of the box however.
> Both editors were affected by the change on X86 where code is placed in 64-bit 
> space by default. This default can be overriden with the LINK qualifier 
> /SEGMENT_ATTRIBUTE=CODE=P0. 
> 
> The problem was that in both editors (and other areas of the operating system 
> and layered products), certain data PSECTS were marked as EXECUTABLE. This 
> worked on VAX, Alpha, and IA64, and was likely a VAX-era optimization to keep 
> certain data co-located with the relevant code. This does not work on X86; 
> Reagan can give the details. 
> 
> Both editors are written in BLISS, and early BLISS compilers (or perhaps the 
> GEM-to-LLVM converter) did not deal with the GLOBAL BIND syntax correctly. 
> 
> I drew the short straw for both editors and had the pleasure of of tracking down 
> where in the code was failing, coming up with stripped-down reproducers, and 
> bringing my findings to Reagan so he could puzzle it out. 
> 
> -- 
> -- Rob

but does TECO work on x86 yet? :-)