[Info-vax] Intel proposal to simplify x86-64

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 6/7/2023 8:50 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> On 2023-06-08 01:19, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 6/7/2023 5:36 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>>> On 2023-06-07 11:09, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>>>> I must ask (since I have never used TECO).
>>>>
>>>> What is the unique feature of TECO that cannot be done
>>>> with some other tool(s)?
>>>
>>> I don't think there is anything that is that unique.
>>> However, depending on how you use it, you might need a bunch of other 
>>> tools to accomplish the same.
>>>
>>> It obviously is an editor. But it's also a programming language that 
>>> can be twisted into doing a lot of stuff. If you are familiar with 
>>> sed (a Unix tool), it is somewhat similar. But I'd say TECO can do 
>>> more. Obviously the original Emacs was written in TECO. There are 
>>> other editors written in TECO as well. I sometimes use it when I want 
>>> to do somewhat more complex operations over larger text files where 
>>> the changes are a bit more complex than just search and replace.
>>
>> Many editors come with "programming capabilities".
>>
>> If we focus on VMS then EDT is a bit primitive, but
>> EVE not so - TPU is very much a full programming language.
>>
>> I cannot imagine any text manipulation functionality that
>> could not be implemented in TPU in relative clean code.
>>
>> (for those that does not know TPU then it is a procedural
>> language in the "Pascal family" with a bunch of editor
>> builtins)
> 
> I don't think we need to dive into the pros and cons of different 
> language or environments.

Different problems and different preferences lead to
different tool choices.

My point was that TPU is a very powerful tool for
text programming.

It is also sort of indicated by the name: Text Processing Utility.

> Suffice to say that I wrote a fairly feature rich Emacs clone in TECO-8. 
> TPU would not even get close to running on a PDP-8...

TPU is actual not bad resource wise.

My experience from late 80's was that about 300 KB memory per
EVE user worked fine on VAX VMS.

Compared to today where Eclipse ships with default initial
memory 256 MB and max memory 2 GB.

But I think that you are right that TPU would not run
on PDP-8 or PDP-11 for that matter. These systems are 15-20
years older than TPU.

Arne