Date: Tue, 08 Sep 1998 14:46:50 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ed Message-ID: <9698.905291210@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 09 Sep 1998 15:17:00 MDT." <35F6F04C.D1E5C6CE@softweyr.com>
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> Ugh. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a favorite, but I still use > it for quick editing tasks where you need to change one string to > another, and in shell scripts. Actually, I wasn't really joking, and though it's certainly true that I use ed pretty rarely (usually when I'm in a situation where my terminal settings or current emulator are too braindead for vi), I still really like it for its concise-yet-powerful approach to editing. The problem most people have with ed(1) is that they don't have enough context to compare it to OTHER line editors, something which I unfortunately have in spades. Not only have I used some of the very worst line editors on the planet, back in the days when a cursor-addressible CRT terminal was either a luxury to be fought over with other staff members at the timesharing facility or simply didn't exist at all, but I've seen the productivity gains which resulted from switching from one of those editors to ed(1). To cite an example, back in the days when an HP2000A (access) was still considered pretty nifty equipment to have, we had a truly egregious line editor called, rather uninspiredly, EDITOR (AKA EDITOR 2000). I used that program for several years, and you haven't really measured program development suckage until you've done BASIC with EDITOR (though the previous generation of punched card weenies and front-panel jockies had it worse, of course). It used only absolute line numbers (no relative expressions allowed), its "search" command was basically like a grep which printed its results but otherwise returned no status or made itself useful in any way but a visual aid, you had to know *exactly* how many lines you had in the file if you wanted to delete all of them (no symbolic constants), etc etc. After a few years of this, an HP2000 fanatic I knew commissioned some Berkeley programmer, who's name most unfortunately escapes me, to write a new editor for the HP2000 and, since that programmer was already familiar with V6, he wrote an ed(1)-clone. I bless his fuzzy little soul to this day for that because it revolutionized editing code on the 2000. You could suddenly do operations that were bounded by ranges of line numbers, you had a halfway sensible search-and-replace function that worked with ranges, man - it was just an entirely new experience. Those who started with vi and then perhaps went on to emacs just have no perspective on what something like ed(1) represents. :-) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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