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From: beard@ux1.lbl.gov (Patrick C Beard)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Serious programming question
Message-ID: <4002@helios.ee.lbl.gov>
Date: 23 Oct 89 01:17:50 GMT
References: <89295.142753CXT105@PSUVM.BITNET>
Sender: usenet@helios.ee.lbl.gov
Reply-To: beard@ux1.lbl.gov (Patrick C Beard)
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley
Lines: 24

In article <89295.142753CXT105@PSUVM.BITNET> CXT105@PSUVM.BITNET (Christopher Tate) writes:
>What sort of data structures are generally used for representing text in an
>editor or word-processor?  Obviously TextEdit is an alternative, but it's slow
>(as far as I've heard) and imposes size restrictions.
>
>Has anyone here done work with writing editors or word-processors?  Could you
>give a newcomer to the problem a little hand getting started...?
>

I've thought about this a bit, though I've not gotten around to implementing
it.  The solution that seems the most flexible is a doubly linked list of
lines (or paragraphs if you prefer).  That way, you'll have fairly small
blocks of memory to move around when you insert characters etc.  And changing
the order of things is very inexpensive.  And the solution would definitely
depend on what the possible attributes are that you'll be keeping track of. 

This is an interesting topic.  What have others done?

Patrick 

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-  Patrick Beard, Macintosh Programmer                        (beard@lbl.gov) -
-  Berkeley Systems, Inc.  ".......<dead air>.......Good day!" - Paul Harvey  -
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