Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!parc.xerox.com!janssen From: janssen@parc.xerox.com (Bill Janssen) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: Dear Saint Andrew... Message-ID: Date: 18 Jul 90 22:34:05 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 61 Excerpts from ext.andrew: 17-Jul-90 Re: Dear Saint Andrew... Nathaniel Borenstein@thu (11539+0) > I really love these wish lists. Me too. > Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 17-Jul-90 Dear Saint Andrew... > Lennart Lovstrand@xerox. (7062+1) >> I wish I had M-X... > I believe that you do, sort of, using Ness, although the set of things > you can do with it is VERY different from what you get in Emacs. I've written a meta-x package. I'll put it on expo. >> I really, really wish there was an UNDO in ez &c. > Ditto. About a year and a half ago, we came up with a scheme for a > "next generation" toolkit that could do an arbitrary undo within the > distributed control structure of ATK-like architectures. (Think about > doing a sequence of operations, each with a different inset, and then > expecting successive "undo" operations to work right.) This exercise > convinced me of two things: it would be possible, and it would be a LOT > of work -- undo in an environment with distributed control is a lot > harder than it is for Emacs. Our scheme involved having each proctable > entry provide a "how to undo me" procedure which would be pushed onto an > "undo stack" (along with some invocation-specific data) when the > proctable entry was called! I've heard this called "the best is the enemy of the good". If we could have a separate undo list for each inset, not a unified list, that would go a very long way toward allowing people to use EZ on a day-to-day basis (as a code editor, for example, where you don't really care about insets (yet)). >> I wish there were indications in the margin about what kind of style >> [etc] the current para was. > Do you know about ESC-s? If not, go into a region of text with styles > and try typing it. I read this a bit differently. Have you ever used InterLeaf WPS? They have a strip to the side of the page that reflects the paragraph type. >> I wish the code wouldn't contain quite so many magic constants and >> obscure defensive coding. > Magic constants are bad. Defensive coding is good, however, so I find > part of this complaint quite cryptic. Personally, the more I look at > source code for standard UNIX utilities, the more astounded I am that > anything ever works at all. Maybe that's the way UNIX does quality control. None of the `standard' applications have any error-checking code, they just expect the underlying mechanisms to work, so the OS people have to *make* them work. Doesn't work out too well for people running research versions of the OS, though... Bill